CHAPTER I
 Toni’s name was Antoine Marcel, but he was never called by it but once in his life, and that was at his baptism, when he was eight days old.
 
He had a shock of black hair and a snub nose, and the tan and freckles on his face were an inch thick, but he had a pair of black eyes so soft and bright and appealing that they might have belonged to one of the houris of Paradise. His wide mouth was full of sharp, white teeth, and when he smiled, which was very often, his smile began with his black eyes and ended with his white teeth.
 
At ten years of age Toni was a complete man of the world—of his world, that is. This consisted of a gay, sunny little old garrison town, Bienville by name, in the south of France.
 
He had his friends, his foes, his lady-love, and also he had arranged his plan of life. He knew himself to be the most fortunate person in all Bie[Pg 2]nville. In the first place, his mother, Madame Marcel, kept the only candy shop in the town, and Toni, being the only child of his mother, and she a widow, enjoyed all the advantages of this envied position. He had no father such as other boys had—Paul Verney, for example, the advocate’s son—to make him go to school when he would rather lie on his stomach in the meadow down by the river, and watch the butterflies dancing in the sun and the foolish bumblebees stumbling like drunkards among the clover blossoms.
 
Paul Verney was his best friend,—that is, except Jacques. Toni, owing to his exceptional position, as the only son of the house of Marcel, candy manufacturer, would have had no lack of friends among boys of his own age, but he was afraid of other boys, except Paul Verney. This was pure cowardice on Toni’s part, because, although short for his age, he was well built and had as good legs and arms and was as well able to take care of himself as any boy in Bienville. Paul Verney was a pink-cheeked, clean, well set up boy two years older than Toni, and as industrious as Toni was idle, as anxious to learn as Toni was determined not to learn, as honest with his father, the lawyer, as Toni was unscrupulous with his mother about the amount of candy he consumed, and as full of quiet courage with other boys as Toni was an arrant and shameless poltroon about some things. Toni was classed as a bad boy and Paul Verney as a good boy, yet the two formed one of those strange kinships of the soul which are stronger than blood ties and last as long as life itself.
 
Toni, being of a shrewd and discerning mind, realized that Paul Verney would have loved him just as much if Madame Marcel had not kept a candy shop, and this differentiated him from all the other boys in Bienville, and although Paul often severely reprobated Toni, and occasionally gave him kicks and cuffs, which Toni could have resented but did not, he had no fear whatever of Paul.
 
Toni’s other friend, Jacques, was a soldier. Jacques was about three inches high and was made of tin. He had once been a very smart soldier, with red trousers and an imposing shako, and a musket as big as himself, but the paint had been worn off the trousers and shako long ago; and as for the musket, only the butt remained. Jacques lived in Toni’s pocket and he was even more intimate with him than with Paul Verney. There were seasons when Paul Verney’s kicks and cuffs caused a temporary estrangement from him on Toni’s part, but there was never any estrangement between Toni and Jacques. Jacques never remonstrated with Toni, never contradicted him, never wanted any share of the candy which Toni abstracted under his mother’s nose and ran down in the meadow to munch. There were some things Toni could say to Jacques that he could not say to any human being in the world, not even to Paul Verney, and Jacques never showed the least surprise or disgust. It is a great thing to have a perfectly complaisant, unvarying friend always close to one, and such was Jacques to Toni.
 
Toni had heard something about the war which occurred a long time ago, when the soldiers went a great way off from Bienville to a place called Russia, where it was very cold. In Toni’s mind, Jacques had been to that place, and that was where he lost the red paint off his trousers, and the black paint off his shako, and the barrel of his musket. Toni had a way of talking to Jacques, and imagined that Jacques talked back to him, a notion which, when Toni repeated what Jacques had said to him, Paul Verney thought quite ridiculous. Jacques told Toni long stories about that cold place called Russia. Toni knew that there was another place, very hot, called Algeria, and Jacques had been there, too. Jacques had been everywhere that the soldiers had been, and he told Toni long tales about these places in the summer nights, when Toni was in his little bed under the roof, with the stars peeping in roguishly at the window, and Madame Marcel’s tongue and knitting needles clacking steadily down stairs at the open door of the shop. And on winter days, when Toni left home for school and changed his mind and went snow-balling instead, Jacques encouraged him by telling him that it was very like Russia.
 
Toni also found another use for Jacques. When he wished to say things which his mother occasionally and properly cuffed him for, he could talk it all out with Jacques. This seemed supremely absurd to Paul Verney and the other boys in the neighborhood, notably the five sons of Clery, the tailor, who jeered at Toni when they discovered his relations with Jacques. But Toni was as insensible to ridicule as to reproof. The only thing that really moved him was when his mother had rheumatism and her knees swelled. Then Toni would cry as if his heart would break, the big tears running down his dirty face as he sobbed and buried his fists in his hair, and would not be comforted, even though his mother could sit in her chair by the stove, and stir the candy kettle, and would give him the kettle to lick, after she had poured the candy out. But this was never more than once or twice a year, and the rest of the time Toni was as happy and as free from care as the birdlings in spring that sang under the linden trees in the park.
 
Toni had already arranged a marriage of convenience for himself, which was of the most advantageous description. Across the street from Madame Marcel’s shop was the baking establishment of Mademoiselle Duval, and Denise, the niece and idol of Mademoiselle Duval, was just two years younger than Toni and as pretty as a pink and white bonbon—in fact, she looked not unlike a bonbon. She had very pink cheeks, and very blue eyes, and a long plait of yellow hair, like the yellow candy of mélasse which Madame Marcel made every Saturday morning.
 
Denise was as correct as Toni was incorrect. She always said, “Oui, Monsieur,” and “Non, Madame,” in the sweetest little voice imaginable, with her eyes cast down and her plump hands crossed before her. Not a hair of her blond head was ever out of place, and the blue-checked apron which extended from her neck to her heels was as speckless as the white muslin frock she wore in church on Sundays. She was the most obedient of children, and Madame Marcel, when she wept and scolded Toni for his numerous misdeeds, often told him that she wished he were only half as good as Denise Duval, who had never disobeyed her aunt in her life. Toni smiled mysteriously whenever his mother said this, and chuckled inwardly at something known only to Jacques and himself, namely, that when he grew to be a man he meant to marry Denise. What could be better than the combination of a candy shop and a cook shop and bakery?
 
And then there were other advantages connected with the match. Many of the little girls that Toni knew had large and dangerous-looking fathers, some of them soldiers with fierce mustaches, and these fathers sometimes kicked and cuffed idle little boys who should have been at school or at home instead of lying in the meadow or loitering upon the bench under the acacia tree by Mademoiselle Duval’s shop, inhaling the delicious odors of the bakery kitchen. Denise had a father who was, indeed, large and dangerous-looking and was a soldier, too; nay, a sergeant, and had the fiercest mustache Toni had ever seen, but he only came to Bienville once a year for a few days on his annual leave, and seemed to Toni a most irrational and singular person. For although he could, if he wished, have eaten all the cakes in his sister’s shop, Toni never saw him so much as look at one of them.
 
On this annual reappearance of Sergeant Duval, Toni kept carefully out of the way. Once when he was hiding under the counter of the shop he had overheard the sergeant asking Madame Marcel why she did not make that little rascal of hers go to school, and when Madame Marcel, a pretty, plump widow of forty, tearfully admitted that she could not, of herself, manage Toni, the sergeant promptly offered to give Toni a good thrashing as a favor to Madame Marcel. This, Madame Marcel, in a panic, declined, and then the sergeant made a proposition still more shocking to Toni’s feelings.
 
“Then why, Madame,” he said gallantly, twirling his mustache, “do you not marry again? If I were young and handsome enough I should offer myself, and then, I warrant you, I would make that young rogue of yours behave himself.”
 
Whether this were an offer or not, Madame Marcel could not determine. She might have fancied the dashing, fierce-looking sergeant, with his five medals on his breast, but that proposition to thrash Toni robbed the proposal of all its charm. And besides that, Madame Marcel, although she praised Denise, felt a secret jealousy of the little girl’s perfections. Toni, as a rule, was less afraid of soldiers than any other people, especially if they were cavalrymen, for Toni dearly loved horses and was not the least cowardly about them, and felt a secret bond of sympathy between himself and all who had to do with the cult of the horse.
 
Bienville had been a place of considerable military consequence, in the old, far-off days, and still retained evidences of having had ten thousand troops quartered there in long rows of tumble-down barrack buildings. But not much remained of this former consequence except the old barracks, a hideous war monument in the public square, and a very grim old woman, the widow of a soldier in the Napoleonic Wars. Toni regarded the monument and old Marie, in her mob cap and spectacles, sitting proud and stern on a bench in the public square, as belonging to each other. All the soldiers, and even the officers, saluted old Marie as they passed—tributes which were received with proud composure.
 
Everything else in the town of Bienville was gay and cheerful, except the monument and old Marie. It was now garrisoned by one cavalry regiment only, and was a depot for horses and cavalry recruits. There was a big riding-school with a tan-bark floor, where the new recruits were broken in and taught to ride. It was Toni’s delight to crawl in by the window or the small side door, and, hiding under a pile of horse furniture in a corner, watch the horses gallop around, their hoofs beating softly on the tan-bark, their eyes bright and glistening, their crests up, and their coats shining like satin with much currying at the hands of brawny troopers.
 
Toni did not know what it was to be afraid of a horse, and loved nothing better than to hang about the barracks stables and riding-school and take cheerfully the cuffs and kicks he got from the soldiers for being in the way. Especially was this true on Sundays when he did not have Paul Verney’s company, for Paul went to church obediently, while Toni, after submitting to be washed and dressed clean, was almost certain to run away, disregarding his mother’s frantic cries after him, and spend the whole morning in the delightful precincts of the barracks stables. Jacques liked it, too, and told Toni it reminded him of those glorious old days when his trousers and shako were new and he carried his musket jauntily, in the long red line that set out for Russia. So Toni haunted the barracks stables to please Jacques as well as himself.
 
One glorious and never-to-be-forgotten day, a good-natured trooper had hoisted Toni on the back of a steady-going old charger, who knew as much about teaching recruits to ride as any soldier in the regiment. The old charger, being offended at finding the small, wriggling object upon his back, took it into his head, for the first time since his colthood, to plunge and kick violently, and ended by bolting out of the barracks yard and making straight across the edge of the town, through the meadow to the old stone bridge that spanned the river. The trooper, who had meant to oblige Toni, suddenly realized that the boy was the only son of his mother and she a widow. Jumping on another horse, he galloped after Toni, down the stony street, into the green lane and across the bridge.
 
 
The old charger, who was eighteen years old, gave out at the end of the bridge and came down to a sober trot. He had not, with all his efforts, got rid of the small, wriggling object on his back. As for Toni, he had the time of his life. It was the one full draft of riotous joy that he had tasted. It was better even than licking the candy kettle on Saturday mornings. The wild flight through the air, as it seemed to Toni, the snorting breath of the old charger, the delicious sense of bumping up and down, lifted him into an ecstasy. When the trooper came up the horse was sedately browsing by the wayside, and Toni, with his arms clasped around the horse’s neck and his black head down on his mane, was in a little Heaven of his own. The trooper, who had expected to find Toni lying by the roadside, mangled, was immensely relieved and swore at him out of pure joy, and, as a reward for not having got his neck broken, allowed Toni to ride the old charger back into the town. This was not to be compared with that wild flight through space, that glorious bumping up and down, that sense of delight in feeling the horse panting under him; but it was something.
 
Toni, trotting soberly home, concluded that he would not tell his mother, but he meant to tell Jacques all about it, and, putting his hand in his pocket, Jacques was not there! Oh, what agony was Toni’s then! He burst into a fit of weeping, and, rushing back to the riding-school, crawled around frantically everywhere the troopers would let him go, searching for his loved and lost Jacques. The story of his ride had got out by that time and he was not kicked and cuffed when he searched, with streaming eyes and loud sobs, for his dearly loved Jacques. But Jacques could not be found, not even along the stone street, nor by the lanes, nor across the old stone bridge, and the day grew dark to Toni. He searched all day, and when he went home at night and told his mother of his loss, Madame Marcel wept, too. It was no good to promise him a whole company of tin soldiers. They were only tin soldiers, but Jacques was his friend, his confidant, his other self, his oversoul. Toni cried himself to sleep that night. It was so lonely up in the little garret without Jacques! And Toni knew that Jacques was lonely without him. Toni pictured poor Jacques, alone and forlorn, lost in the tan-bark, or trampled under foot in the street, or floating down the darkling river, or perhaps being chewed up by the goats that browsed on the other side of the bridge. In the middle of the night Madame Marcel was awakened by Toni’s groans and cries.
 
“Oh, mama, mama!” he cried, “how lonely Jacques must be! What is he thinking of now? He has no musket to take care of himself. Oh, mama!”—and then Toni howled again.
 
The next day Toni was up at dawn searching for his beloved. He searched all the morning, but he could not find the lost one. When he came home to dinner at twelve o’clock, he met Paul Verney, and Paul saw by Toni’s woebegone look and tear-stained face that some calamity had befallen him. Toni had looked forward with triumphant pleasure to telling Paul about that wild ride on the old horse’s back, but he could give it no thought. Paul was kind and sympathetic and understood Toni’s sorrow, which was of some little comfort to the bereaved one. While the two boys sat together on the bench under the acacia tree, close to Madame Marcel’s shop, up came little Denise, as neat and pink and white as ever. One of her hands was closed, and, as she approached Toni, she said, in the sweetest small voice in the world:
 
“Toni, is this yours? I found it in the street,”—and, opening her little hand—oh, joy!—there was Jacques, his shako a little crooked, one of his legs out of plumb, but it was Jacques. Toni, without a word of thanks, seized Jacques, and, rushing off, flew to his favorite spot for meditation—a little corner on one of the abutments of the old stone bridge. Once there, he kissed Jacques and held him to his breast, and told him of the heart-breaking search made for him, and Jacques, as usual, was silently sympathetic and understood all that Toni had suffered.
 
Meanwhile Paul Verney, ashamed for Toni’s want of manners in not thanking Denise and all unaware of the great wave of gratitude that was surging through Toni’s whole being, went into the shop and told Madame Marcel of Toni’s good fortune. Madame Marcel was so overjoyed that she not only invited Paul to help himself to whatever he wanted in the way of sweets, but ran out and, catching Denise in her arms, kissed her and brought her into the shop and invited her, as she had invited Paul Verney, to select what she wished. Denise, with characteristic modesty, took two small sticks of candy, but Madame Marcel gave her, as well as Paul, a large bag of very beautiful bonbons.
 
It was late in the afternoon before Toni appeared, his eyes shining like the stars that peeped in at his little window, his wide mouth showing all his white teeth. Madame Marcel took him by the hand, and they went over with state and ceremony to thank Denise for restoring the loved and lost Jacques. Toni felt indignant that Mademoiselle Duval, a tall, thin, elderly, heartless, maiden lady, should laugh at Jacques when Toni displayed him, and tell Madame Marcel she could have bought a couple of boxes of tin soldiers for one-half the bonbons she had given Denise. But Toni had known all the time that very few grown people know anything about boys, and was simply filled with contempt for Mademoiselle Duval. She was thin and ugly, too, not round and plump like his own mother, and had the bad taste to prefer clean, well-mannered little girls to dirty and greedy boys. Up to that time, Toni’s feelings toward Denise had been purely of a mercenary character, but from the day she restored Jacques a little seedling sentiment sprang up in Toni’s heart; the great master of all passions had planted it there. It was something like what he felt for Paul Verney—a sense of well-being, even of protection, when Denise was near. She had acted the part of a guardian angel, she had restored Jacques to him, and she did not seem to mind his dirty face and grimy hands. She acquired a bewitching habit of dividing with Toni the stale apple tarts her aunt gave her, and, beckoning to him across the street, she would have him sit by her on the bench under the acacia tree and always give him at least two-thirds of the tarts.
 
A few days after the tragedy of Jacques’ loss and return, Sergeant Duval, Denise’s father, appeared for his annual visit to Bienville. The story of Jacques was told to him, and when he came over to pay his call of ceremony on Madame Marcel, he was so rude as to twit Toni about Jacques. Toni, much displeased at this, retired to his usual place of refuge under the counter, and concluded that when he married Denise he would contrive to be absent during Sergeant Duval’s annual visit.
CHAPTER II
 Paul Verney was twelve years old, and had never had any affairs of the heart, like Toni. But one June afternoon, in the same summer when Toni had lost and recovered Jacques, and had succumbed to the tender passion, fate overtook Paul Verney in the person of Lucie Bernard, the prettiest little creature imaginable, prettier even than Denise and very unlike that small piece of perfection. Paul, who was very fond of reading, took his book, which happened to be an English one, to the park that afternoon of fate, and was sitting on a bench, laboriously puzzling over the English language, when a beautiful little girl in blue, with a gigantic sash and large pale blue hat, with roses blushing all over it, under which her dark hair fell to her waist, came composedly up to him and said:
 
“Let me see your book.”
 
Paul was so astonished at being addressed by a young lady, under the circumstances, that he promptly handed over his book, and Lucie, seating herself on the bench, proceeded to read it. Paul was surprised to see that the English book, through which he had been painfully spelling his way, seemed perfectly easy to Lucie, who, without a moment’s hesitation, read on, remarking casually to Paul:
 
“I can read English as well as I can read French. My mother was an American, you know, and Americans speak English.”
 
Paul did not know the piece of family history thus confided to him, nor, indeed, did he know anything about this little nymph, but he thought in his honest little heart that she was the most charming vision his boyish eyes had ever rested on. He admired her dainty little slippers, her silk stockings, her general air of fashion, but blushed at finding himself sitting on the same bench with her, particularly as he saw his father the gray-haired advocate, Monsieur Paul Verney, approaching. He was just about to sneak away, leaving his book in the hands of the fair brigand, when a fierce-looking English nursery governess suddenly descended upon them, and, seizing Lucie by the arm, carried her off. The governess threw Paul’s book down on the gravel path, and Paul picked it up.
 
Somehow, the book seemed to have a different aspect after having been held in the charming little fairy’s hands. Paul was possessed by a wholly new set of emotions. He longed to tell some one of this startling adventure—a little girl planting herself on the bench by him and taking his book from him without the least embarrassment or even apology. What very strange little girls must those be whose mothers were American! Paul had plenty of friends among the boys of his own age and class, and among his school-mates, but he had never confided in any of them as he did in Toni Marcel. So presently, wandering down by the bridge where he was certain to find Toni at this hour of the day, he saw his friend perched in the little cranny which he called his own, on the bridge above the dark and rippling water. Two small boys could be squeezed into this place and Paul Verney, climbing up, sat side by side with Toni, and, with his arm around his friend’s neck, bashfully but delightedly told Toni and Jacques, who, of course, heard everything that was told to Toni, all about this beautiful dream-like creature he had seen in the park. Then Toni said, without any bashfulness at all:
 
“I have got a sweetheart, too—it is Denise; some day I am going to marry her, and in the morning we will eat candy at mama’s shop, and in the afternoon we will eat cakes at Mademoiselle Duval’s shop.”
 
Toni’s eyes, as he said this, shone with a dark and lambent light. Paul Verney, on the contrary, had a pair of ordinary light blue eyes through which his honest, tender soul glowed. He was the most romantic boy alive, but all his romantic notions he had carefully concealed from every human being until then. A dream had come into his boyish mind, not of munching bonbons and stuffing cakes, such as Toni’s practical mind had conceived, but a dream of the beautiful Lucie grown up, dressed in a lovely white satin gown, with a tulle veil and orange blossoms, such as he had once seen a young lady wear when she was married to a dashing lieutenant in a dazzling uniform. Paul meant to be a dashing lieutenant in a dazzling uniform some day, and then the vision of Lucie, stealing instantly into his mind, seemed to fill a place already prepared for her there. The two lads sat, Paul’s closely-cropped, reddish hair resting upon Toni’s disheveled black shock, and felt very near together indeed.
 
 
“But how will you ever see mademoiselle again?” said Toni to Paul.
 
Paul’s face grew sad.
 
“I don’t know how I ever shall,” he said. “I never had a girl speak to me before, and I never played with a girl—I don’t think it’s proper. And the English governess was so cross to Lucie—for so she called her. But I shall walk every day in the park, and perhaps I shall see her again.”
 
Paul was as good as his word and the very next afternoon walked in the park by himself. He was a neat boy always, but that day his face shone with scrubbing, and he had on his best sailor suit of white linen, and his little cane in his hand. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, and even the shady paths of the park glowed with a beautiful, mysterious, green light. As Paul walked along, he heard a whisper in his ear. It was Toni, who had crept up from behind a clump of shrubbery and said to him:
 
“There she is, just down that path, sitting with Captain and Madame Ravenel and holding Madame Ravenel’s hand.”
 
Paul, following the path, came at once on the bench where sat his divinity, as Toni had described. He doubted if he would have had the courage to bow to her, but Lucie called out:
 
“Oh, that is the nice little boy who was reading the English book yesterday.”
 
Paul, blushing up to the roots of his reddish hair, made three bows, one to Madame Ravenel, one to Lucie, and one to Captain Ravenel. Madame Ravenel returned his bow, as did the captain, with much gravity, and Paul passed on, his heart beating with rapture. He had quite often seen the Ravenels and knew them by name. They were apparently the only sad-looking persons in all Bienville. They lived in a small, high, gloomy, old house with a garden at the back, just around the corner from the little street in which Madame Marcel had her shop. Captain Ravenel was a retired officer, but no one ever saw him talking with any of the officers of the garrison, nor was he ever known either to enter any of their houses or to welcome any officers to his house.
 
Madame Ravenel was the most beautiful woman in Bienville. She was about thirty, but so sad-looking that she seemed much older. She always wore black—not widow’s black or mourning, but black gowns which, although very simple, had an air of [Pg 24]elegance that set off her rare beauty wonderfully. Paul had seen her nearly every day since the Ravenels first came to Bienville three years before, but he did not remember ever having seen Lucie until that glorious hour when she burst on his dazzled vision and took his book away from him. From the time he could first remember seeing Madame Ravenel he had never passed her without a feeling coming into his boyish soul like that when he saw the moon looking down on the dark water under the bridge, or heard the melancholy song of the nightingale in the evening. He had confided this feeling to Toni, who answered that both he and Jacques felt the same way when they saw Madame Ravenel. There was something sad, beautiful, touching and interesting about her. Paul could not put it into words, but he felt it, as did many other people.
 
Madame Ravenel went to church every morning, and when Paul was dressing himself in his little bedroom, off from his father’s and mother’s room, he could always see her returning from church. And what was most remarkable to Paul, Captain Ravenel was always either with Madame Ravenel or not far behind her. He did not go into the church, but, with a book or a newspaper in his hand, walked up and down outside until Madame Ravenel appeared, when he would escort her home. And so it was almost always the case, when Madame Ravenel appeared on the street that Captain Ravenel was not far away. It would seem as if he kept within protecting distance. He was a soldierly-appearing man, serious-looking, his hair and mustache slightly gray.
 
Madame Ravenel was always beautiful, always sad, always gentle, and always in black. Paul had noticed, in passing the church sometimes, that Madame Ravenel never went beyond the entrance and never sat down, even on Sundays. She only went a few steps inside the church door, and Paul asked his mother why this was. Madame Verney shut him up shortly with that well-known maxim that little boys should not ask questions. Sometime after that, Paul, still wondering about Madame Ravenel, asked his father why she looked so sad, and why Captain Ravenel never stopped and laughed and talked with the officers walking the streets, or dining at the cafés, or strolling in the park, and Monsieur Verney gave him the same reply as Madame Verney, which was most discouraging.
 
This, of course, did not cause Paul’s interest in the Ravenels to abate in the least. It only convinced him that they had some strange and interesting story, such as having found a pot of gold somewhere, or having had their only child stolen from them, or some of those delightfully romantic tales which a twelve-year-old boy can imagine. He was no less interested in Lucie on finding that she belonged in some way to Madame Ravenel. He had walked on a considerable distance in the park, and was trying to screw up his courage to turn around and walk back past the bench where Lucie sat, when he suddenly found her at his side. Her dark eyes glowed brightly and she was tiptoeing in her delight.
 
“I know all about you,” she said triumphantly. “You are Paul Verney, the advocate’s son. I like little boys very much—very much—but I never have a chance to see anything of them. However, just now I began to chase a butterfly and my sister Sophie did not call me back. But you are the butterfly,”—and at this she burst into a ripple of impish laughter.
 
Paul was so surprised that he did not have time to be shocked at the boldness on the part of this young lady of ten years, but his heart began to thump violently and he was trembling when he said to her:
 
“But aren’t you afraid to leave your sister?”
 
“Not in the least,” replied Lucie airily. “I am half American, and American children are not afraid of anything, so Harper, my nursery governess, says. What can happen to me? And besides that, I have always had my own way—that is, almost always—I had it about coming to see my sister Sophie. Would you like me to tell you about it?”
 
Paul was only too charmed to hear anything Lucie might tell him, although in a panic for fear the fierce-looking English nursery governess might appear. Lucie, without further ado, seated herself with him on the ground and, sticking her little slippered feet out on the grass, began, with the air of Scheherazade, when with confidence she turned her matchless power on the bridegroom who meant to murder her next morning:
 
“Sophie, you know, is my sister, although she is much older than I am. We had the same papa, but not the same mama, but Sophie was just like a mama to me after my own mama died. She was married then to another man named Count Delorme. How I hated him! He was so cross—cross to me and cross to Sophie and cross to everybody. He had a son, too, when Sophie married him, and that boy—Edouard was his name—was horrid, just like Count Delorme. I lived with Sophie then, and once a year I would go and visit my Grandmother Bernard. She is very tall and handsome and always wears black velvet or black satin and looks very fierce. Everybody is afraid of her except me. But she isn’t really in the least fierce, and I have my own way with her much more than I have with Sophie. All that grandmama can do is to scold and say, ‘Oh, you little American, what am I to do with you? You need more strictness than any French child I ever knew,’ and then she lets me do as I please.”
 
Lucie stopped here and cast a side glance at Paul. She possessed the art of the story-teller and wanted to know whether Paul was interested in what she was telling him. Paul was so much interested in Lucie that he would have listened with pleasure to anything she said, but the beginning of what she was telling him sounded like a book, and he listened with eagerness. Lucie, seeing this, proceeded. Like many other people, she enjoyed being the heroine of her own tale, and it lost nothing in the telling.
 
“Well, I used to like this visit to my grandmother—she has a big château, larger than the commandant’s house, five times as large—bigger than the Hotel de Ville.”
 
Lucie opened her arms and hands wide to show Paul the enormous size of the Château Bernard.
 
“And then she has such beautiful things—so many servants, carriages, horses, chandeliers, and gardens—the most beautiful gardens, and a park ten times as large as this.”
 
Paul listened to this somewhat coldly. He did not like bragging and could not understand the innocent, imaginative delight which Lucie took in describing a pretty château.
 
“I used to love to go there and visit grandmama when I lived with Sophie. We lived in another place—a great big city called Châlons. But I loved being with Sophie best. She was not at all like what she is now, but she was the gayest person in Châlons. She wore beautiful pink gowns, and white hats, and feathers, and went to balls every night, but she always had time to look after me. [Pg 30]She used to take me in the carriage with her every afternoon to drive, and before she went to a ball she always saw me undressed and in my bed and came to tell me good night. And she looked over my lessons and made me practise my music and did everything for me, just as the other little girls’ mamas did for them. Then something happened—I don’t know what it was—it was something dreadful, though, and I remember the day. It rained very hard, and Captain Ravenel came in the afternoon and was sitting in the drawing-room with Sophie, and Count Delorme came in, and there was a terrible noise, and the door came open, and Count Delorme struck Sophie with his fist hard, and Captain Ravenel caught her in his arms. I was leaning over the baluster, and then Harper ran down, and carried me off, and would not let me go near Sophie, though I heard her crying outside the door, and I cried inside the door just as hard as I could. The next day Harper—that is my nursery governess that takes care of me now and dragged me away yesterday—came and took me in a carriage to the railway station, without letting me say good-by to Sophie, and carried me off to my grandmama’s château.”
 
 
Paul was interested enough now. Lucie’s story sounded more and more like a story out of a book.
 
“When I came to the château, my grandmother—she is Sophie’s grandmama just as much as she is mine—kissed me, and hugged me, and told me I was to live there, but I was very angry because I hadn’t seen Sophie to say good-by even, and I kept asking why Sophie didn’t come to see me or send for me or even write me a letter. I used to write her letters myself—you see, I am ten years old and I can write very well—and I gave them to grandmama to send to Sophie, but I found a whole bunch of my letters half-burned in the grate in grandmama’s room. Then I saw they were deceiving me, so I wrote a letter and I stole a postage stamp, and I knew how to address it to Sophie, but I got no reply. Then I stole some more postage stamps, and wrote some more letters, but I never heard anything about Sophie. I had a governess and music-master, but grandmama never made me study or practise my music as Sophie had done. She let me do everything I wanted except to see or hear from Sophie. No matter what I asked for, grandmama first refused and then she got it for me. She bought me the finest doll in Paris and a little pony and wicker phaeton, and used to take me to the circus—my grandmama lives near Paris, you know—and gave me five francs of my own to spend every Saturday. But I wanted Sophie. At night I would think about her, and cry and cry, and then grandmama would have me put in her bed and she would cry, too, but she would not let me see Sophie. At last I couldn’t eat anything—not even bonbons—and they sent for the doctor, who said grandmama must take me to the sea-shore, but after we came from the sea-shore I missed Sophie more and more, and I cried every night and would not eat, and at last I told grandmama if she did not let me see Sophie I would starve myself to death—I would never eat anything—I would hold my breath until I died—or eat a cake of paint out of my paint-box. Paint is poisonous, you know. Grandmama told me of a little girl who died from eating paint out of her paint-box. At last even the doctor grew frightened, and told grandmama if I did not see my sister Sophie he was afraid I would be very ill, so then—this was two summers ago—she let Harper bring me here, and I stayed a whole week with Sophie. Captain Ravenel is her husband now, and not that hateful Count Delorme, and I didn’t know Captain Ravenel before, but I love him now almost as much as I do Sophie. He is so kind and good, and not a bit cross. Sophie told me that I must be satisfied with my week with her, and must be good, and perhaps grandmama would let me come again, and that when I went back to the Château Bernard I must eat and keep well and not cry any more. I did as Sophie told me, but Sophie doesn’t know grandmama as well as I do. I begged her all last winter to let me come and see Sophie again, and all this spring, and then this summer, but she wouldn’t let me, and then I found out how to manage grandmama.”
 
Paul listened to this with an interest which bordered, however, on disapproval. He had never heard of small children managing their elders, but Lucie had told him that she was half American, which might account for anything. Paul had heard that the Americans were a wild people, so perhaps even the children did as they pleased. Lucie drew up her little silk-stockinged foot, and settled her skirts around her.
 
“And how do you suppose I did it? I didn’t eat anything for two days. Grandmama was frightened to death. When I wouldn’t eat, they left cakes around, and beautiful little biscuit, but I knew what that was for and wouldn’t touch them; so after three days grandmama gave in and told me that Harper might bring me to see Sophie, and so I came, and I am to stay two whole weeks, and after this every time I wish to see Sophie, all I will have to do is to stop eating, for that frightens grandmama and she lets me have my own way.”
 
Paul eyed the bewitching Lucie still with some disapproval.
 
“But do you think it is right to treat your grandmama so? Isn’t she a good grandmama to you?”
 
“Oh yes, indeed,” answered Lucie. “I love her very much, but not like Sophie. You love your aunts and grandmama, but not like your mother.”
 
That was quite true, for Paul was as fond, in his quiet way, of his mother and father, as Lucie, in her violent and demonstrative fashion was of Sophie, or as Toni was curiously fond of Madame Marcel.
 
CHAPTER III
 While this conversation was going on, Toni, who had seen Lucie go chasing after the butterfly, watched Captain and Madame Ravenel. Paul had told him there was something mysterious about the pair, and Toni was vaguely conscious of this strangeness, and felt in his childish, ignorant way, like Paul, the charm of Madame Ravenel’s touching beauty. He heard Madame Ravenel say:
 
“What can have become of the child?” and Captain Ravenel got up at once to look for her, going a little way along the path down which Lucie had disappeared. And then a strange thing happened before Toni’s eyes. A young officer coming by, with a waxed mustache and his cap set jauntily on the side of his head, stopped directly in front of Madame Ravenel, and looked at her with a smile which Toni did not at all understand, but which made Madame Ravenel’s pale face flush to the roots of her dark hair. Then the officer said, in an insolent yet insinuating voice:
 
 
“May I be permitted, Madame, to admire your beauty a little closer?”—and sat down on the bench without any invitation, throwing his arm around the back of it so as almost to embrace Madame Ravenel, who started up with a cry. At that moment, Captain Ravenel appeared at the back of the bench. He was not so big a man as the young officer, but, catching him by his collar, he threw him sprawling on the ground, and then deliberately stamped upon him as he lay prostrate. Madame Ravenel stood as still as a statue. The officer sprang from the ground and would have flown at Captain Ravenel’s throat, but two other officers passing ran toward them and separated them, and pinioned the arms of the officer to his side. Toni heard Captain Ravenel say, as he handed his card to one of the officers:
 
“I saw this man grossly insult this lady, and he shall pay for it with his life,”—and then Madame Ravenel swayed a minute or two and fell over in a dead faint. The two officers hurried their comrade off, leaving Captain Ravenel alone with Madame Ravenel, who lay prone on the grass, quite insensible.
 
Toni remembered having once seen a lady faint in the park, and that some one fetched water from the fountain close by, and dashed it on her face, but he had nothing to fetch it in, having no hat on his head—a hat being a useless incumbrance which he only wore on those rare Sundays when his mother dragged him to church against his earnest protests. But there was Paul Verney’s hat. Toni scampered down the path and in two minutes had found Paul. Lucie was just leaving him, and Toni, mysteriously beckoning to him, whispered:
 
“Fill your cap with water and take it to Madame Ravenel. She is lying on the grass fainting like I saw a lady once, and somebody at that time threw water on the lady.”
 
Paul, with the true lover’s instinct to serve those loved by his adored one, ran to the fountain and filled his cap with water, and then flew as fast as his legs would carry him to the place where Madame Ravenel still lay. Most of the water was spilled over his white linen suit, but there was enough left to revive Madame Ravenel.
 
“Thank you, my boy,” said Captain Ravenel, as he dashed the water on Madame Ravenel’s face. Then she opened her eyes and tried to stand up. Paul ran for more water, and came back with about a tablespoonful left in his cap, while he himself was dripping like a water spaniel. But Madame Ravenel, by that time, was sitting up on the bench, pale, with her dark hair disheveled, and her hat still lying on the ground. Captain Ravenel was supporting her.
 
Paul Verney, being a gentleman at twelve years of age, felt instinctively that having done a service it was his place to retire. He received a tremulous “Thank you” from Madame Ravenel, who then asked anxiously of Captain Ravenel:
 
“Where is Lucie—what has become of the child?”
 
But Lucie at that moment appeared, and Paul, longing to remain and hear more interesting stories about grown people from Lucie’s cherry lips, still felt bound to retire, which he did.
 
Toni, on the contrary, making no pretensions to being a gentleman, had to see the whole thing played through. He concealed himself behind the shrubbery, and saw with pain, but with deep interest, Madame Ravenel weep a little—tears which Captain Ravenel tried to check. Then, in a moment, Harper appeared and Lucie went off, her usually sparkling, dimpling little face quite sorrowful; and then Madame Ravenel, leaning on Captain Ravenel’s arm, walked away.
 
Toni stood and pondered these things to himself. What queer creatures grown people were after all! Still they were very interesting if one got rid of all their scrapes and muddles. What did that dashing-looking officer want to put his arm around Madame Ravenel for? Toni, reflecting on these things, took Jacques out and asked him about them, but Jacques replied that he knew no more about them than Toni did.
 
That night Toni, not being made to go to bed at eight o’clock like Paul Verney and all other well-conducted boys, was prowling around the garden of the commandant’s house, of which the back was toward the little street in which Madame Marcel lived. The garden gate was open, and Toni sneaked in and seated himself on the grass, just outside the window on the ground floor which looked into a room that was Colonel Duquesne’s study.
 
Toni had an object in this. There was a great clump of gooseberry bushes under this window, and Toni loved to gorge himself on Colonel Duquesne’s gooseberries. True, he could have had all the gooseberries he wished from his mother, but they did not have the delicious flavor of those surreptitiously confiscated from Colonel Duquesne’s garden. Toni was afraid of the commandant, as he was afraid of the monument in the public square and of old Marie, and of everybody, in fact, except his mother, and Paul Verney, and little Denise, and Jacques. But he knew the garden much better than the commandant did, and his short legs were quick enough to save him in case any one should come out of the house.
 
Toni saw, through the window, the two officers, who had separated the other officer and Captain Ravenel, sitting in grave conversation with the colonel.
 
“It is most unfortunate!” said the colonel, a grave-looking, gray-mustached man. “What could have induced Ravenel to come to Bienville to live? It would seem to be the last place on earth that he and Madame Ravenel would select.”
 
Then one of the other officers said to the colonel:
 
“I understand that they came here principally on account of Madame Ravenel’s health, and besides, Ravenel owns the house in which they live. It isn’t much of a house, but I hear that Delorme spent every franc of Madame Ravenel’s money, and they have nothing but this house and Ravenel’s half-pay to live on, which probably accounts for their being in Bienville. But I must say that they have kept themselves as much out of sight as possible.”
 
“I knew Delorme,” said the colonel, “and a more unprincipled scoundrel never lived. It is a great pity that Ravenel didn’t knock the fellow’s brains out on the day when Madame Delorme left Delorme. Nobody would have been sorry for it. I have known both Ravenel and Madame Ravenel for years, and they are the last people living that I should expect to commit the folly they did, going off together and remaining two or three weeks before they separated. It was a species of madness, but they have paid dearly for it. I understand that Madame Ravenel is tormented by religious scruples about her divorce.”
 
The colonel got up from his chair and walked up and down two or three times. The vision of Sophie Ravenel in her triumphant beauty ten years before, and the pale conscience-stricken Sophie of to-day, overwhelmed him. He remembered Ravenel, spirited, gay, and caring for no other than a soldier’s life, and now cut off from all comrades, his life-work ended. Surely these two had paid the full price for their three weeks’ desperate folly, of love, shame, rapture and despair. Then awakening suddenly to the madness of what they had done, they had separated, not to see each other again until Delorme had obtained a divorce; and Sophie, after having been branded as a wife who had dishonored her husband, was married to Ravenel, who, for her sake, had sacrificed all his worldly prospects. The colonel was a strict moralist, but in his heart he reckoned that there were many worse people in the world than Sophie and Ravenel. The two officers sat silent while the colonel took a couple of turns about the room, and then he sat down and spoke again:
 
“But the question is—what are we to do about Creci?”
 
“Creci swears,” said the older of the two officers, “that Madame Ravenel smiled at him as he passed and gave him an invitation to come and sit by her.”
 
“I am afraid,” said the colonel, in a very cold voice, as he shook the ash from his cigar, “that Creci is mistaken.”
 
“Mistaken!” thought Toni to himself, “Creci was lying, pure and simple.” That Toni knew, for he had seen the whole transaction.
 
“We are bound, under the circumstances,” said Captain Merrilat, “to take Lieutenant Creci’s word for it. Naturally Madame Ravenel’s word can not be taken.”
 
Colonel Duquesne pondered for a while, stroking his mustache, and then said:
 
“Come to me in two days—I will see what can be done,”—and then, after a little more talk, the two officers got up and went away, and Colonel Duquesne strolled out in the garden where Toni was still behind the gooseberry bushes.
 
The colonel knew the Widow Marcel’s boy and disapproved of him on general principles, but did not suspect the little scamp was hidden behind the gooseberry bushes which the colonel passed as he walked up and down the dark path. As he turned to pass the third time, he heard Tom’s shrill, boyish voice piping out:
 
“You know, Jacques, I saw it all—I was watching Captain and Madame Ravenel, and I saw Captain Ravenel when he got up and went away—and then the young officer came along, and Madame Ravenel wasn’t looking his way at all—she was looking down with her hands in her lap, and I don’t think she even saw the lieutenant until he came up to her quite close and said something impudent to her, and then Madame Ravenel’s face got as red as red could be, and the lieutenant plumped himself down as close to her as he could and threw his arm around the back of the bench, and Madame Ravenel looked scared to death and jumped up, and then Captain Ravenel came and caught the lieutenant by the collar and threw him on the ground and wiped his foot on him, and you know, Jacques, you saw that just as I did.”
 
The colonel stopped suddenly in his walk, and looking about, saw Toni’s little black head among the gooseberry bushes. He did not see the other boy with whom Toni was talking, but he understood well enough what Toni meant. Then Toni kept on:
 
“Jacques, I tell you, Madame Ravenel wasn’t even looking at the lieutenant, and I know she hates him by the way she pushed him off when he sat down by her.”
 
The colonel walked around the gooseberry bushes and there sat Toni on the ground, but Jacques, whom the colonel innocently supposed to be another boy, was not in sight, being then in Toni’s pocket.
 
“So, my lad,” said the colonel, “you saw the fight between Captain Ravenel and Lieutenant Creci?”
 
But Toni, looking up at the colonel’s short, soldierly figure and determined air, was seized with one of those sudden panics which often overcame him. He could not have said a word to save his life, with the colonel’s keen eyes fixed on him. So, jumping up and seizing hold of Jacques in his pocket, Toni ran as fast as his legs would take him to the garden gate, through the narrow street, and up into his own little attic room, and did not feel safe until he was tucked in his own bed with Jacques under the pillow to keep him company.
 
It was the habit of the colonel to take a walk in the park very early every morning directly after his breakfast coffee, and it was also Captain Ravenel’s practice to pass through the park at the same hour. His, however, was not a pleasure stroll, but was for the purpose of taking to the post-office some hundreds of envelopes which he addressed every day for a pittance, with which to eke out his half-pay. The two men had been friends in past days, although the colonel was much older and higher in rank than Ravenel, but they passed each other morning after morning without a word being exchanged, Ravenel gravely saluting the colonel, and the colonel slightly returning the bow, and each man felt a tug at his heart for the other man.
 
Colonel Duquesne was a great stickler for the moralities, and Ravenel’s fall had been to him a terrible shock. He understood what little Lucie, and Paul Verney, and Toni did not understand in the least, the particular thing which had befallen Madame Ravenel. It was the old, sad story of a villainous husband to a sensitive and dependent woman, of a man a thousand times better than the husband loving the wife silently, of hearing her unjustly accused in his presence, and even suffering the indignity of a blow. That blow drove Sophie Delorme into Ravenel’s arms. It seemed to her, in the horror and shock of the moment, as if there were no other place for her. She could not go to her grandmother, Madame Bernard, who had arranged the match between Sophie and Delorme and who had shut her eyes stubbornly to the wretchedness of the marriage. Apart from Madame Bernard, Sophie was singularly alone in the world. Her small fortune had been squandered by Delorme. She loved Ravenel because she could not help it, and so these two poor souls, like goodly ships driven against each other by storms and hurricanes, to their destruction, this man and this woman were driven together, driven to transgress the moral law, driven by the iron hand of fate into a position, the last on earth that would have been expected of them.
 
The victory of passion and despair over honor had been brief. In three weeks they recoiled from what they had done. Delorme had promptly begun proceedings for a divorce and Ravenel had besought Sophie to repair their fault as far as possible in the eyes of the world by marrying him as soon as the decree of divorce should be granted. But Sophie was a deeply religious woman and it seemed to her an increase of wrong-doing to marry Ravenel. There was but one way out of it and Ravenel, by employing one of the best ecclesiastical lawyers in France, discovered that there were certain technicalities in the religious marriage that Delorme had not complied with, and it was possible to have the marriage, religious as well as civil, annulled. Only then did Sophie consent to marry him. For her he had sacrificed his position in the army, his standing in the world and his modest fortune, and had done it as if it were a privilege instead of a sacrifice.
 
No woman of Sophie Ravenel’s lofty ideals could fail to appreciate this, but neither could she forget that she had fallen from her high estate. However she might strive to be happy, Ravenel could not but see that she would live and die a conscience-stricken woman. She made no moan, however, but secretly took on herself the whole sin. Ravenel did the same, taking on himself all the blame. And so their married life, although sad and colorless, was one of exquisite harmony. They led a most retired life, rarely leaving their house except for Sophie’s early visit to the church and the walk in the park in the afternoons. Whenever she appeared on the street, as Paul often had noticed, Ravenel was never far away, and Sophie, had any affront been offered her, had his protection close at hand. To them one place was the same as another and, as Colonel Duquesne had imagined, necessity had much to do with their settling in Bienville. An officer on half-pay has not much choice of residence, and the little old house in Bienville at least gave them a shelter. So they had come, bringing their remorse with them, likewise their love.
 
The wages of sin in their case was not luxury. They lived as poorly as gentle people could live and exist. They kept no servant, and as it was painful for them to have to dine at the cafés, Sophie, with the assistance of one old woman who was still active at seventy-five, prepared all their meals. With her own hands she made those cheap and simple black gowns whose fit and style were the despair and admiration of the professional dressmakers in Bienville. In this matter of her dress and appearance, Sophie retained all the pride which had ever been hers when she was, as little Lucie said, the gayest and best-dressed woman in Châlons. It was a part of a duty that she owed Ravenel, for with the fine generosity of a woman she reckoned herself much in Ravenel’s debt, and felt she should lose as few as possible of those charms that had won him to his downfall. She never lost her appearance of elegance, by dint of an ingenuity, little short of miraculous. She uttered no complaining word, and no day passed over her head that she did not tell Ravenel he was the best man in the world.
 
There was a wheezy old piano in the little house, and on this she played to him the airs that had charmed him in the days at Châlons. She was externally the most modest and reserved woman in Bienville,—and who shall say that she was not the same in her soul? Be not too free, you virtuous people, to condemn this poor lady; there are sinners and sinners, if you please.
 
As for Captain Ravenel, his wrong-doing had placed on him, according to his way of thinking, an obligation of a life most spotless. He had always been, as Colonel Duquesne had said, a man of high character, but when love and misery and fate had made him, in a way, the destroyer of the woman he loved and respected most on earth, it raised him to a pitch of heroic virtue. Like Sophie, no drudgery was too great for him and when she was preparing their modest dinner, Captain Ravenel was digging in the garden. By the labor of his own hands, he raised the most beautiful pease, potatoes and melons that had ever been seen. He would have worked every hour of the day, except that he felt as Sophie did with regard to him, that he must not lose all of those graces and habits of a gentleman which had first made her love him. In the afternoon he dressed himself in his well-brushed frock coat and together he and Sophie took a walk, and sat and listened to the band playing in the park. This was their chief recreation. At night he sat up many hours addressing those envelopes and circulars which he took to the post-office early in the morning and for which he was paid a pittance. Like Sophie, no complaint escaped him, and for every protestation of love and gratitude she made to him, he returned in twofold. They were not happy—life had no happiness to give two souls like theirs, situated as they were—but they would have died if they had been torn apart.
 
It was a portion of Sophie’s self-imposed punishment that she should never go fully into a church, halting, as Paul Verney had noticed, just within the door, and, like the publican, not daring so much as to lift her eyes to the altar, but calling herself a sinner and feeling herself to be the greatest sinner on earth. Another part of her punishment was the separation from Lucie, the little half-sister whom she had attended from the hour of her birth with a mother’s care, and toward whom she had taken a mother’s place. But she made no complaint of this, nor of anything else; and when Lucie, by her own ingenuity, had contrived to come back to her, it brought a gleam of joy into Sophie’s life such as she had never expected to feel again.
 
Madame Bernard remained unforgiving. As Lucie had truly said, although as stern and uncompromising in looks as the monument in the public square at Bienville and old Marie who sat on the bench and knitted sternly, Madame Bernard was, at heart, a greater coward about people than little Toni. She knew if she once saw Sophie everything would be forgiven, and so she avoided seeing her, and dared not even write to her. Little Lucie had had no real difficulty in accomplishing her object of seeing Sophie by the means she had retailed to Paul, and otherwise wrapped the stately Madame Bernard around her little finger.
 
Lucie, who was accustomed to luxury, adapted herself with ingenuous perversity to the plain way of living of the Ravenels. She even learned to make omelettes herself, and with her little lace-trimmed gown tucked up around her waist, to the horror of Harper, the nursery governess, actually learned to broil a chop as well as Sophie could.
 
Lucie was a child of many passions. Her attachment to Sophie was one of the strongest, and Sophie alone, of everybody on earth, could bend [Pg 53]Lucie to her will,—that is, as long as they were together, for, childlike, Lucie forgot all the gentle commands and recommendations laid upon her by Sophie when they separated, and remembered few of the admirable things which Sophie asked her to do. But she loved Sophie with a determined constancy that none of Madame Bernard’s blandishments nor all the bonbons in Paris could change.
CHAPTER IV
 At the hour when Colonel Duquesne and the two officers were discussing Creci’s insult to Sophie—for insult they all well knew it to be—Sophie and Ravenel were sitting on their balcony after their supper, and Lucie had been put to bed. Sophie had not spoken to Ravenel of what had happened in the park since their agitated walk home, but now she said timidly, placing her hand in his, in the soft purple twilight which enveloped them, and through which the lights of the town twinkled beneath them:
 
“What do you think that man Creci will do?”
 
“Prefer charges against me, I suppose,” returned Ravenel, “but if he does, I think he will get the worst of it. No one could believe that you, Sophie, could give any encouragement to a man like that. Your life here has been too prudent. No other woman, I believe, could have lived with the beauty and natural gaiety that you possess, effacing herself so completely, and all for me. What an evil hour for you, dearest, that ever we met!”
 
“Do not say that,” cried Sophie. “If I had it all to live over again, I would do as I have done except—except—”
 
She buried her face in her hands. Ravenel, too, looked ashamed. To both of them the iron entered into their souls at the recollection of the first three weeks after Sophie left her husband. Then Sophie, raising her head, presently said:
 
“But it was an evil hour for you. I might have endured my fate, while but for me you would have married happily, and be to-day where you ought to be—in a good position, with your talents recognized and—”
 
The two poor souls often talked together in this way, speaking frankly to each other, and each taking the blame. They spoke a while longer, each fearing and dreading the morrow, and then Sophie went to see that Lucie was asleep in her little bed, while Ravenel went to his work of addressing envelopes.
 
Lucie was not asleep, as she should have been, but wide-awake and very talkative.
 
“Oh, Sophie,” she said, when Sophie sat down by the bed in Lucie’s little room, “how glad I am that you are married to Captain Ravenel! I like him so much better than Count Delorme. Sophie, I hated Count Delorme!”
 
“So did I,” replied Sophie, her pale face flushing, and her tongue for once committing an indiscretion. But the child was quite unconscious of it. She hated Count Delorme herself, and saw every reason why Sophie and every one else should hate him.
 
“And Edouard,” continued Lucie, “that hateful, hateful boy! Oh, I think it is ever so much nicer as it is, and if only I could live with you, and make omelettes every day, and have a little garden and dig in it when Captain Ravenel is digging in the big garden, how much I should like it, and then I could go and visit grandmama at the château.”
 
Sophie laid her head down on the pillow by Lucie, and kissed the child’s soft red lips. After all, how happy she could be but for that terrible moral law which, because they had transgressed it, kept thundering in her ears its maledictions.
 
But no shame and no sorrow can wholly take away the joy of loving and being loved as Sophie loved and was loved.
 
Next morning, about seven o’clock, as Ravenel was walking through the park to the post-office with his parcel of circulars, he came face to face with Colonel Duquesne. The colonel, instead of passing him with a stiff nod, halted before him, and said:
 
“Good morning, Captain Ravenel.”
 
Ravenel was startled, but he replied, saluting respectfully:
 
“Good morning, sir.”
 
“There is, I am afraid, some trouble ahead of you with regard to Lieutenant Creci,” said the colonel, speaking very deliberately. “I wish to say now, from long knowledge of the lady in the case, that I can not believe she committed the smallest impropriety, nor do I think that Creci’s word that she did so would carry the slightest conviction to any person in Bienville; and whatever comes of it, the lady’s name must be kept out of the affair absolutely.”
 
Ravenel could have fallen upon his knees with gratitude when Colonel Duquesne said this. The idea that Sophie’s name should be dragged into a public scandal was heart-breaking to him. The tears came into his eyes, and he was about to extend his hand impulsively to Colonel Duquesne, but changed his mind, and crossed his arms.
 
He bowed, however, profoundly, and said:
 
“I can not express to you, sir, how much I thank you for what you have said. It is well-deserved by that lady, who is the most modest, the most retiring, the purest-minded—”
 
Ravenel stopped with a lump in his throat. The tears by that time had dropped upon his dark, sunburned face. He brushed them away, but Colonel Duquesne thought no less of him for those tears.
 
“I am quite of your mind,” he said quietly, “concerning that lady. The circumstances are most unfortunate. I can express to you, privately, a degree of sympathy which I can not do publicly, but believe me, no man could be more anxious than I am to save that lady’s feelings in this affair. Captain Merrilat will wait on you this morning. I think if you will agree to make him a very slight apology, everything can be arranged, and, for my part, I pledge you my word, as Lieutenant Creci’s commanding officer, to use all the power I possess to induce him to accept anything in the shape of an apology which you may offer.”
 
“But I can not apologize,” blurted out poor Ravenel. “The lady in question was sitting quietly on the bench, and did not even see Creci, and he came up and spoke to her insultingly, and the lady became embarrassed and alarmed, and then he sat down by her most impudently and improperly, and attempted to throw his arm around her, and then I caught him and thrashed him—and am I to apologize for that?”
 
The colonel paused. The story which he had overheard that naughty little boy of Madame Marcel’s telling the night before in the garden corresponded exactly with what Ravenel had said,—not that Ravenel’s word alone needed any corroboration with Colonel Duquesne.
 
“Yes,” he said, “you must say something which may be construed into an apology. Not a man in the regiment sustains Creci’s course, but for reasons which you understand, the chief of which is the lady in the case, it must be hushed up. I have arranged for you to meet Creci this morning at my house and the affair shall be settled before me.”
 
Ravenel, with his soul in his eyes, looked at the colonel, who was a man with a heart in his breast, even though he was a colonel; and then the colonel held out his hand. Ravenel gripped it for a moment and then hurried away through the park that he might not miss the morning mail, for he was as careful and prompt in the performance of his duty with regard to these circulars, which he addressed at next to nothing a thousand, as if it had been the best-paid and most important work in the world.
 
But his heart was more joyful than it had been for many a day. He had something pleasant to take back to Sophie. When he returned, and they had their eleven o’clock breakfast together in the little garden, he looked so cheerful that Sophie felt almost gay. They sat with Lucie at the little round table with a white cloth on it, under a big acacia tree. Close by them were a dozen tall oleanders in tubs, for Captain Ravenel, turning his unusual skill in flowers to account, supplied most of the cafés in town with their ornamental plants. Their breakfast was simple, but very good, and Lucie triumphed in the production of the omelette which was the work of her own hands. She was already lamenting that in one week more she would have to go back to the Château Bernard, and Madame Bernard’s chef.
 
“Oh, it is so nice to be with you here!” she cried, and then said, as she had done two or three times before: “It is so much nicer than at Châlons—and I hated Count Delorme!”
 
As she spoke the name, Ravenel looked away, while poor Sophie blushed and trembled, but Lucie, meaning to please her hosts, kept on:
 
“When I am grown up, and get my money, I intend to come and live with you, Sophie and Captain Ravenel. Harper says that when I am eighteen I shall have a whole lot of money in America that grandmama can not keep me out of, and that I can spend it as I like, and I will come and live in Bienville and have a carriage and everything I want, but I think I would like to stay in this house—it is small, but so very pleasant.”
 
“Harper should not tell you such things, Lucie,” said Sophie. She looked at Captain Ravenel. It is impossible to keep nursery governesses and upper servants from gossiping,—how much had she told Lucie in the past, and how much might she tell her in the future?
 
Presently Lucie was sent away to practise on the piano, for it was a part of Sophie’s plan that, when Lucie returned to her grandmother after these brief and forced visits, the child should show some improvement.
 
Then Ravenel told Sophie that as soon as he finished breakfast, he was to go to Colonel Duquesne’s house, and have the meeting with Creci, and he repeated the colonel’s chivalrous words to her. Sophie’s pale face flamed up. It was something in the arid waste of life to have known two such men as the one before her and Colonel Duquesne, who would not strike a woman when she was helpless before him, and who pitied the weaknesses of the human heart.
 
“But when it comes to apologizing,” said Ravenel, grinding his teeth, “what am I to say?—to say that I am sorry for having kicked him, when I wished to kill him?”
 
“Dearest,” replied Sophie, “do what the colonel advises. He would not counsel you to do anything against your honor.”
 
At twelve o’clock precisely, Ravenel presented himself at the colonel’s house. He was in his uniform, for, although retired, he was still an officer. The soldiers saluted him respectfully, and the aides spoke to him politely. Everybody felt sorry for Ravenel, and most honest and brave men in his place would have done as he had. He was ushered into the colonel’s room, and there sat Colonel Duquesne and Creci, with his two friends, the officers who had dragged Ravenel and himself apart in the park. The colonel and others present bowed gravely to Ravenel, who returned the bow and seated himself at the colonel’s invitation, and then after a little silence the colonel stated the case briefly, but said at the end, with emphasis:
 
“I think in every case of this sort, without impugning Lieutenant Creci’s word, the presumption is that a mistake has been made. Whatever Lieutenant Creci thought about the lady in question, whose name must, by no means, be mentioned, I feel sure that she was unconscious of any attempt to attract his attention. We will proceed upon that supposition, if you please.”
 
Creci’s handsome, stupid face grew scarlet, Ravenel’s dark skin turned a shade darker, the other two officers looked impassive. Then the colonel went on to say that he would recommend Captain Ravenel to make an apology to Lieutenant Creci, and he would strongly urge Lieutenant Creci to accept it. At that there was a long silence. Ravenel really knew not how to apologize for having done what his honor and his conscience and his inclination had told him was right to do. He blamed himself for not having stamped his foot in Creci’s face, and so marked him for life. The pause became awkward while Ravenel was turning these things over in his mind. At last, with the colonel’s eye fixed upon him commandingly, he mumbled something about regretting that the occasion had arisen—the rest of it was lost in his mustache, for the colonel, as soon as he heard the word regret, turned promptly to Creci. There was a menace in Colonel Duquesne’s eye—a look which commanded obedience. Creci, inwardly raging, sullenly bowed, and Captain Merrilat said quickly:
 
“I think Lieutenant Creci accepts the apology, and we may consider the affair as ended.”
 
Everybody present knew what Colonel Duquesne meant. He had known Sophie when she was fresh from her convent school, had known her as the young wife of an unfeeling and vicious man—he had known her at the moment when her courage failed her, and she had left the hard and stony path she had been traveling with Delorme to go on a path still hard and stony with Ravenel. Colonel Duquesne was tender-hearted where women were concerned, and felt in his soul that he could not have stood Delorme as long as Sophie had stood him. All these things were working in his mind when Ravenel and Creci and the two officers were rising and making their formal adieus.
 
Ravenel went home to Sophie and the two were almost gay over the result of the affair which had been so baneful to them in the beginning. It almost seemed to the two poor souls as if they had some friends left. That very afternoon, when taking their one solitary indulgence—their walk in the park—they passed the colonel, who bowed to Sophie quite in the old way, although he did not speak. The colonel was a widower with no daughters and, therefore, was quite safe in doing this, not having a domestic court of inquiry ahead of him.
CHAPTER V
 Lucie had only four days more to remain in Bienville, but, except for the approaching parting from Sophie and Ravenel, they were indeed very happy days to her. The child’s active and aggressive little mind, which was part of her American inheritance, dwelt on that charming vision which Harper, with the usual indiscretion of servants and nursery governesses, had shown her—that vision of all the money she wished to spend, which would be hers at eighteen, with no one, not even Madame Bernard, to interfere.
 
Lucie enjoyed another stolen interview with Paul Verney, for this young lady, at ten years of age, was a well-developed flirt and romanticist. Not all her French training had been able to get the American out of her, and she had with it all the generous impulses and the happy daring with which the American child seems to be dowered.
 
Paul Verney, in his afternoon walks, had the pleasure of bowing twice to Captain and Madame Ravenel, but neither time was Lucie with them. On the afternoon before Lucie left Bienville, she was walking with the Ravenels, Harper, as usual, in the distance. Lucie, with the ingenuity peculiar to her age and sex, determined to go on a search for Paul Verney, and so arranged her plans with much art.
 
She asked Sophie if Harper could take her to the fountain in the park to see the little fishes swim in the basin. This reasonable proposal being agreed to, Harper took Lucie by the hand, and off they went. Once at the fountain, around which there were benches, Harper was sure to find some of her colleagues, and Lucie, providing she reported at the end of every ten minutes, was certain of an hour of liberty.
 
Lucie utilized her first ten minutes by finding Paul Verney. There he was, sitting on the same bench and reading the same English book as on the first afternoon that she had spoken to him. When Paul saw his lady-love approach he rose and blushed and smiled, and Lucie bowed and smiled, without blushing, however. Seating herself on the bench, and settling her fluffy white skirts around her, she said to Paul with a queenly air:
 
 
“You may sit down.” Then she added, quite seriously, “I am going away to-morrow.”
 
Paul’s boyish heart gave a jump. He was secretly very much afraid of Lucie, and disapproved of her—but she was so fascinating, and life at Bienville would seem so different after she went away. He stammered:
 
“I am sorry, Mademoiselle.”
 
“But I shall come back,” said Lucie in a sprightly tone. “You see, it is so very easy to frighten grandmama. All I have to do is to stop eating for two days, and it really isn’t so bad at all.”
 
Paul Verney, although not a greedy youngster like Toni, thought that to go without eating for two days was a very severe test of affection, but it was like everything else about Lucie, dashing and daring, and quite out of the common. He replied timidly:
 
“I hope, Mademoiselle, you won’t make yourself ill. It always makes me ill to go without my dinner even.”
 
“I suppose,” said Lucie, “that is when your mama punishes you—isn’t it?”
 
Paul blushed more deeply than ever. He wished to appear a man, and here was Lucie reminding him that he was, after all, only a little boy. Then Lucie asked him:
 
“What do you mean to be when you grow up?”
 
“A soldier, Mademoiselle,” said Paul, straightening himself up involuntarily. “I am going to the cavalry school at St. Cyr. I shall ride a fine horse like the officers here in Bienville. I told papa and mama my last birthday, and they are quite willing.”
 
“But it will be a long time yet,” said Lucie, “won’t it?”
 
“Not so very long,” said Paul. “In four years I shall go to the cavalry school, and then in four years more I shall be graduated, and then I shall be a lieutenant, and have a sword, and wear a helmet with a horse-hair plume in it.”
 
The picture which Paul unconsciously drew of himself was very attractive to the imaginative Lucie. She looked at him meditatively, and wondered how he would look when he was grown up, with his sword and horse-hair plume. Paul was not particularly handsome, but his somewhat stocky figure was well-knit, and he looked unqualifiedly clean and honest—two great recommendations in any man or boy.
 
“By the time you are a lieutenant with a sword,” she continued, “I shall be a young lady with a long train and I shall be very rich. Harper told me so, and then I am coming to Bienville, and I will buy the commandant’s house, and have the finest carriage in Bienville, and have a ball every night.”
 
Paul listened to this with a sudden sinking of the heart. The realization came to him, as much as if he had been twenty instead of twelve years old, that this splendid picture which Lucie drew of her future did not accord with his, the son of a Bienville advocate, who lived in a modest house and whose mother made most of her own gowns. And besides that, he did not like, and did not understand Lucie’s innocent bragging. He was a sweet, sensible boy, with a practical French mind, who never bragged about anything in his life, and who did heroic, boyish things in the most matter-of-fact manner in the world, and never thought they were heroic. But Lucie was so charming! Like many a grown up man his judgment and his heart went different ways. Lucie had his heart—there was no question about it.
 
Lucie would have liked to stay a long time with Paul, and Paul would have enjoyed staying with Lucie, but, looking up, he saw his father and mother approaching, on their way to the terrace, where, like all the other inhabitants of Bienville, they spent their summer afternoons having ices or drinking tea and listening to the music. The Verneys were a comfortable-looking couple, fond of each other and adoring Paul. They smiled when they saw Paul seated on the bench and the charming little girl talking to him. They knew it was none of Paul’s doing, for he was afraid of girls and always ran away from them.
 
As his father and mother drew nearer, Paul’s impulse to rush away, in order to avoid being seen with Lucie, almost overpowered him, but he was at heart a courageous boy, and a chivalrous one, and he thought it would be cowardly to run off; so he stood, or rather sat his ground with apparent boldness, but his face was reddening and his heart thumping as his father and mother approached. Lucie, however, was not at all timid, and when she saw Monsieur and Madame Verney coming so close, asked Paul who they were.
 
“It is my father and mother,” said Paul in a shaky voice, opening his book with much embarrassment and turning over its pages.
 
 
“I think they look very nice,” said Lucie, “and see, they are smiling at you. I think they are smiling at you because you are talking to me.”
 
Paul’s head went down still lower on his book, and his face burned crimson. Lucie, with great self-possession, got up from the bench, and, making a pretty little bow to Monsieur and Madame Verney, skipped off back to Harper.
 
Monsieur Verney, a pleasant-faced man of fifty, prodded Paul with his cane.
 
“What charming young lady was that, my son, with whom you were speaking?”
 
“Mademoiselle Lucie Bernard,” Paul managed to articulate.
 
“And a very pretty little thing she is!” said Madame Verney, who was, herself, pretty and pleasant-looking, sitting down on the bench, and putting Paul’s blushing face upon her shoulder. “For shame, Charles, to tease the boy so!”
 
Paul hid his face on his mother’s shoulder, meanwhile screwing up his courage to its ultimate point. Then, raising his head, and looking his father directly in the eye, Paul said:
 
“When I grow up, I mean to marry Mademoiselle Lucie.”
 
 
The boy’s clear blue eyes looked directly into his father’s, which were also clear and blue, and between the boy and the man a look of sympathy, of understanding, passed. His father might laugh at him, but Paul knew that it was only a joke, after all, and as long as he behaved himself, no unkind word would be spoken to him by that excellent father.
 
“Oho!” said Monsieur Verney to Madame Verney, “so we are promised a daughter-in-law already!”
 
“That pleases me very much,” said Madame Verney, smiling. “I hope that Mademoiselle Lucie will grow up as good as she is pretty, and then I shall be very glad to have her for a daughter-in-law.”
 
Then his mother kissed him, and Paul got up and walked on with his father and mother, holding a hand of each and wondering if any boy ever had such a kind father and mother. They joked him about Lucie, but Paul did not mind that. He rather liked it, now that the murder was out. Presently, when Paul had gone off to play and the Verneys were sitting at a little table by themselves on the terrace, Monsieur Verney suddenly fell into a brown study, and, after a few minutes, bringing his fist down on the table and making the glasses ring, said to Madame Verney:
 
“I know who that little girl is now—I could not place her at first. She is the half-sister of Madame Ravenel. The child is allowed to visit her once a year—what can the family be thinking of to permit it?”
 
Madame Verney knew Sophie Ravenel’s history perfectly well, as did everybody in Bienville, and she knew more than most people; for she said to Monsieur Verney:
 
“At the time when Madame Delorme left her husband for Ravenel, this child, whom she had brought up from her birth, was taken away from her by her grandmother, their father’s mother, who is also the grandmother of Madame Ravenel. This little girl’s mother was an American, I am told. The child, I know, has been permitted to visit Madame Ravenel before, but this will scarcely be allowed after she is two or three years older. I have also heard that she has a large fortune through her mother, in her own right.”
 
At this the great maternal instinct welled up in Madame Verney’s heart. Why should not her Paul, [Pg 75]the best of boys, marry a girl with a large fortune and a position like Lucie’s, which was far above Paul’s? She began to dream about Paul’s matrimonial prospects—dreams which had begun when he was a little pink baby lying in his cradle. The Verneys were not rich, nor distinguished, nor was there anything except love which would be likely to provide Paul with a wife suitable to his merits. Madame Verney, following up this dream concerning Paul, began secretly to pity Madame Ravenel, and argued that, after all, nothing about that unfortunate lady could reflect on Lucie.
 
Meanwhile Lucie, kneeling down on the edge of the basin of the fountain, looked into it and saw there a church brilliantly lighted, with palms and flowers all about, and full of gaily-dressed ladies and officers in uniform. And then the organ sounded and up the aisle came marching herself, in a white satin gown and lace veil; and she leaned on the arm of a young officer with a sword and a helmet with a horse-hair plume in it, and he had the honest eyes of Paul Verney.
 
At the end of the week Lucie vanished from Paul’s sight, but not from his memory. According to all the laws of fitness, Paul, the most honest, [Pg 76]straightforward, matter-of-fact, obedient little fellow in the world, should have found his counterpart in the shape of another Denise Duval of his own class; for little Denise was as honest, as correct, as matter-of-fact and as obedient as Paul Verney. But, behold how it works! Paul fell in love with the vivacious, sprightly, charming Lucie, while Toni had determined to link his fate with the irreproachable and demure Denise.
 
CHAPTER VI
 The summer waned and the autumn began and then a great shock came to Toni—two great shocks, in fact. First Paul Verney, who, next to Jacques, was Toni’s best friend, was sent away to boarding-school. Toni felt a horrible sense of loss and emptiness. In losing Paul, he seemed to lose a protector as well as a friend. He had not been so much afraid of other people when Paul was about, but now he was more afraid of them than ever. And then, Toni, being a strong, robust fellow for his age, it was forced upon Madame Marcel that, as he would not go to school, he must learn a trade.
 
Madame Marcel was ambitious for Toni and shed many tears over his determination not to make a walking encyclopedia of himself if he could help it. What was the use of his learning to work, anyhow? When he married Denise, as he fully intended to do, they could live over Mademoiselle Duval’s shop and eat cakes and tarts for dinner and candies for breakfast and supper. There was the bench under the acacia tree close by Mademoiselle Duval’s shop, and Toni expected to spend his adult life sitting on that bench, in the summer time, with Denise and eating cakes, and in the winter time sitting in his mother’s warm kitchen licking candy kettles.
 
It was a very grave matter to select a trade for Toni. Madame Marcel had aspirations for him which were not shared, however, by anybody else; for all the persons with whom she talked concerning Toni’s future were quite brutal, so his poor mother thought, and recommended putting the boy to doing hard work for which his strong little legs and arms and back well fitted him. But Madame Marcel secretly yearned to see her Toni a gentleman, though at the same time she had not the courage to advance this proposition in any way. So she thought as a compromise between a trade and a profession she would make Toni a musician—a violinist, in short.
 
When this was broached to Toni, he objected to it, as he did to every suggestion that he should do anything except amuse himself, talk with Jacques and hang around the horses at the cavalry barracks. His mother, however, for once showed some determination, and Toni, finding that he absolutely had to learn to work, begged and prayed that he might be allowed to work about the one livery stable in the town of Bienville. Toni really did not think he would mind feeding and currying horses, he loved them so much—almost as much as Jacques and Paul Verney—and, like Jacques, they were interested listeners—more interested than most of the people he knew. Madame Marcel would by no means consent to this, and urged on Toni the advantage of playing first violin in the orchestra of the theater, like Hermann, the yellow-haired Swiss, who was first violinist at the Bienville theater.
 
“Do you call that work,” asked Toni indignantly, as if he were already a captain of industry—“sitting there and fiddling for amusement? Why, mama, that isn’t work at all—it’s just amusement.”
 
“Then why do you object to it?” asked Madame Marcel helplessly.
 
“Because it is not work,” replied Toni boldly. “When I work, I want to work—currying horses or something.”
 
“But have you no ambition?” cried poor Madame Marcel. “Do you want to be a mere hostler?”
 
Toni’s mind had not projected itself very far. He knew that he would have to serve his time in the army, and it had occurred to him that he would certainly be put in the cavalry, and he said as much to his mother. But Madame Marcel, who could not persuade herself that Toni was not an innocent and guileless creature, could not endure the thought of turning him loose in a stable, to bear the kicks and cuffs, the jokes and jeers, of a lot of rough stablemen.
 
She asked Toni if he would be willing to learn the trade of a tailor. Clery, the tailor, lived opposite them, and was a very respectable man, who made a good living for his family. But Toni hastily objected to this—he was afraid of the five Clery boys.
 
So Madame Marcel and Toni kept going around in a circle for many days and weeks. Finally Madame Marcel one morning, taking Toni by his hand, having washed him clean for once, and dressed him in his best Sunday suit, carried him off to see Monsieur Hermann, the Swiss, in regard to converting Toni into a second Sarasate or Ysaye. Hermann lived in two little rooms at the top of a rickety old tenement, and Toni’s heart sank as he climbed the stairs, holding on tightly to his mother’s hand. He did not like Hermann’s looks—a big, blue-eyed Swiss, who imagined that he resembled Lohengrin and Siegfried, and dressed the part as well as he was able by cultivating a head of long curly blond hair and a huge blond beard.
 
Madame Marcel explained, as mothers are apt to do under similar circumstances, that, finding Toni totally unfitted for anything else, she had determined to make a musician of him. Hermann smiled. There was nothing of the artistic temperament visible in that tousled head of black hair, those bright, dark eyes which changed their expression as quickly as the little river under the stone bridge changed its look on an April day of sun and rain. And Toni had hard, muscular little hands, which did not seem to Hermann as if they could ever wield the magic bow. Toni himself looked sulky. He had no mind to be a fiddler, and did not mean to learn. However, his mother arranged that he should go the next day to take his first lesson, and then they went down stairs, Toni clattering ahead.
 
He rushed off to the cavalry barracks at the other end of the town. It was the time for feeding the hundreds of horses in the long rows of stalls, and [Pg 82]Toni had a few happy moments, crawling in and out as the troopers would let him, quite regardless of the Sunday suit. Oh, if he could only live with horses all the time instead of people! Now that Paul Verney was gone, he felt that it was useless for him to try to have a talking friend. But horses could understand perfectly well, and he could find much greater companionship in a horse than in a fiddle.
 
He firmly resolved not to go next morning to take his music lesson if he could possibly help it; but when the time came he could not help it, and he started off, at a snail’s pace, for Hermann’s lodging. Hermann, leaning out of his window, saw Toni come slouching along, looking as if he were going to his execution. He scowled at Hermann, leaning out of the window. Few small boys love lessons on the violin, which is a difficult instrument, but well worth giving one’s days and nights to, thought Hermann. When Toni finally appeared, he was the image of stolidity and stupidity. Hermann put a violin in his hands, and tried to explain the scale to him, but Toni was hopelessly inept. He could not understand those queer-looking things called notes. His mind wandered to the riding-school, where he knew the troopers were going through their exercises. He thought of the day he took that glorious wild ride on the old cavalry charger. He began to wonder what Paul Verney was doing, and reflected that it would be well for him to frame an excuse some time that day to go into Mademoiselle Duval’s shop, so she would give him a bun.
 
It may be imagined to what a pass Toni’s state of mind reduced poor Hermann, who finally rapped him smartly over the head with the violin bow, and told him to go home to his mother and tell her that she had an ass for a son. Toni, at the first rap from the bow, which did not hurt him in the least, howled terrifically, and, rushing off home to his mother, told her, between his sobs, a harrowing tale of how Hermann had beaten him most cruelly with the violin bow. However, Madame Marcel could not find a scratch on him to corroborate Toni’s sensational tale, and flatly refused to believe him. In spite of Toni’s protests, he was sent back to Hermann’s lodgings for his music book and the little violin which Madame Marcel had asked Hermann to provide for the boy. He returned home, carrying both music book and violin, those instruments of torture, and seriously considered studying tailoring after all, as two of the Clery boys were doing. But Clery made his boys work, and Toni had great hopes that Hermann would never be able to get any work out of him.
 
Little Denise, who was soft-hearted, had seen him coming and going in his pursuit of an artistic career, and her heart was touched at the spectacle of Toni’s unhappiness. When he came home that second day, Denise was sitting on the bench under the acacia tree and was knitting industriously. Denise had all the virtues which Toni lacked. As Toni approached, his head hanging sullenly down, Denise held out her hand and in it was a little piece of stale tart. This brightened Toni up, and, sitting down by Denise, he told her a moving story of the cruelties he had suffered at Hermann’s hands, adding several atrocities to the original ones.
 
“Poor, poor Toni! I feel so sorry for you.”
 
“You ought to,” replied Toni, deeply touched by his own eloquence, and beginning to cry. “That man will beat me to death some day, I know he will, and I hope he will, too, because then even my mother will be sorry she sent me to learn the fiddle. O-o-o-o-h!”
 
 
 
Mademoiselle Duval interrupted this tender scene by coming out and calling to Toni:
 
“You good-for-nothing little boy, why don’t you go home and practise the violin and mind your mother? Oh, I warrant Madame Marcel will see trouble with you!”
 
Toni concluded that when he married Denise he would see as little as possible of his aunt-in-law as well as his father-in-law.
 
He went back the next day, and many days after. For weeks and months honest Hermann strove with the boy, but Toni simply would not learn the violin. However, a strange thing happened—he found he could talk to Hermann, and was not afraid of him, and Hermann discovered that this lazy, idle, dirty, bright-eyed, insinuating urchin, who had no ear for music, had some strangely companionable qualities. Toni even grew intimate enough with Hermann to tell him all about Jacques, and actually was courageous enough to show that redoubtable warrior to his friend. He told Hermann also of his friendships with horses and said to him:
 
“Do you know, I feel as if you were a horse—a great big sorrel cart-horse.”
 
Hermann threw back his head, and opened his great mouth and laughed at this.
 
“And I am not the least afraid of you,” continued Toni, “and that is very queer, because I am so afraid of people, except Paul Verney.”
 
“And shall I tell you,” said Hermann, laughing and twisting his hands in the boy’s shock of black hair, “what I think you are like? A monkey—except that you have not sense enough to learn to dance, as a monkey does.”
 
Toni was delighted at this. Then he said quite gravely:
 
“Do you know, Monsieur Hermann, of any business a boy can learn that will give him all he wants to eat, and plenty of time to amuse himself, and not make him work, and support him?”
 
“Oh, yes,” said Hermann. “Marry a young lady with a large fortune. That gives a man enough to do, but yet it is not called work.”
 
“I had already made up my mind to that,” said Toni seriously, “I am going—now don’t tell anybody this—I am going to marry little Denise Duval, and we are going to live part of the time with Mademoiselle Duval and eat cakes, and the rest of the time with my mother and eat candies.”
 
 
“Ho-ho!” laughed Hermann, who had a great, big, joyous laugh, “what a clever arrangement—and Mademoiselle Duval has agreed to this, and her niece, and your mother?”
 
“My mother will agree to anything I say, and Mademoiselle Duval will agree to anything Denise says, but I have not asked Denise yet—she is so young, you know, she doesn’t understand anything about these things, but I shall marry her just the same. If I ever have a wife, I mean that she shall be nice, and clean, and good, and stay at home and work hard. Women ought to work hard, you know, Monsieur Hermann.”
 
Hermann shouted out again—his great roaring laugh.
 
“You are, after all, not such a little idiot as I supposed,” he said. “Mademoiselle Denise will no doubt work and keep you in idleness. Now play your scale,”—and then Toni played his scale—a terrible scale, that began and ended nowhere, and which caused Hermann to grind his teeth. He caught Toni and shook him.
 
“Play that scale again, you little rascal!” he roared, and Toni played it worse than before.
 
“Oh, my God!” cried Hermann, “to think of teaching you the violin! I might just as well try to teach one of the horses in the riding-school—I am sure any of the horses could play as well as you do.”
 
Toni listened to this, and was pleased. He had no notion of learning to play the violin, but he had learned to like coming to Hermann’s lodging and talking about all sorts of things, particularly as he had no one else whom he could talk to.
 
Meanwhile, Madame Marcel was delighted when she found that Toni, after a while, grew to make no objections to going to take his music lesson. He learned so little, however, that Hermann, who was an honest fellow, began to have conscientious scruples about taking Madame Marcel’s money for Toni’s lessons.
 
At the end of six months Hermann went to Madame Marcel and told her frankly that Toni could never become a Sarasate or an Ysaye, and made the same comparison about teaching a horse to play the fiddle as easily as he could teach Toni. Madame Marcel looked at him with wondering eyes. Toni professed to be so anxious to learn. That young person had discovered that spending an hour each day doing nothing, with Hermann’s big, kindly face to look into, and being able to tell things to some one who could understand as Paul Verney did, was really a great scheme. Then he would always spend another hour going the half-mile to Hermann’s house, and an hour coming back, and he could always invent a plausible excuse for taking so long; and he had no mind in the world to give up his once-dreaded music lessons.
 
“But he is so fond of his music!” pleaded Madame Marcel. “He loves to take his lesson.”
 
“Oh, God!” cried Hermann. “That boy is fooling you, Madame Marcel. He fooled me for a little while, but he is not learning anything—he does not mean to learn anything.”
 
“He likes you so much!” wailed Madame Marcel.
 
“And I like him—the idle little rascal!” replied Hermann good-humoredly. “He is the queerest little chap, and I like to talk to him. You are paying your good money for that, Madame Marcel—he is not learning to play the violin—he never will learn.”
 
Madame Marcel sighed, and a great gloom fell on her. She thought she had solved the problem of Toni’s future, and here it was rising up before her, even more complex and more appalling than before.
 
“Do you think it would do any good,” she asked anxiously, “if I were to whip Toni?”
 
“Not a bit, Madame,” replied Hermann. “Perhaps if you let me thrash him—”
 
This was the second proposal of the kind which Madame Marcel had received, the other one being that offer of Sergeant Duval’s to become a father to Toni, and to give him all the thrashings he richly deserved. Some idea of the same sort flashed into her head, and at the same moment it came into Hermann’s mind. He had grown so unreasonably fond of the little rascal, and what a pity it was that the boy should not be made to learn and to behave himself! So he said sentimentally to Madame Marcel, with almost the same words and exactly the same meaning which Sergeant Duval had:
 
“Madame, you ought to marry in order that Toni may have a man’s strong hand to control him. If I could aspire”—for Hermann was as poor as poverty, and Madame Marcel, with her candy shop, was comfortably off for a widow with one child. Madame Marcel shook her head. Sergeant Duval was far more attractive to her than this big, hulking, blond violinist, but not even the dashing sergeant could win her on his promise to give Toni his deserts.
 
“No, Monsieur,” said Madame Marcel, fingering her apron as girlish blushes came into her face, “I am not thinking of changing my condition. My life shall be devoted to Toni, and as I firmly believe that he has great talent for music, and really tries to learn, if you will continue to let him go to you, I shall be delighted, and consider it a favor from you!”
 
“Very well, Madame,” replied Hermann, in a tone of resignation, “if you wish to throw your money away, you may pay it to me, for God knows I need it. But I assure you, I might just as well undertake to teach the town pump to play the violin as your Toni, and Toni has no more notion of learning to play than the town pump has. Good morning, Madame.”
 
Toni, in this affair, scored a brilliant victory over his mother and Hermann. For two whole years more he kept up this delightful farce of learning to play the violin, and in that time he learned one little air—Sur le Pont d’Avignon—which he played in a most excruciating manner, flatting his notes terrifically, and playing with a reckless disregard of time, which almost broke poor Hermann’s heart. When Toni played this air for the first time before his mother, on a summer afternoon, the good soul began to doubt, for the first time, whether Toni could be made a great musician. Sergeant Duval, happening to be at home on his annual leave, heard these strange sounds proceeding from Madame Marcel’s kitchen behind the shop, and came over in great alarm, explaining that he heard weird noises and feared that Madame Marcel had perhaps fallen into a fit. Madame Marcel was highly offended at this notion of Toni’s performance, and directed Toni to play Sur le Pont d’Avignon for the sergeant, who listened gravely to Toni’s scraping and caterwauling, his only comment on it being:
 
“I have known a man to be shot for less than that.”
 
CHAPTER VII
 
 
In the summer Paul Verney came home from boarding-school. He was much taller and broader than he had been before, much improved in mind, but the same kind, brave, gentle Paul. He was overjoyed to see Toni again, and the two lads, on meeting, hugged each other, or rather Toni hugged Paul; for although Paul was tender-hearted, he was undemonstrative and felt the dignity of his fourteen years and his two terms at boarding-school. Not so with Toni, who had no sense of personal dignity whatever.
 
At once their old relations were established and the two lads spent many hours together, as they had done in summers past, cuddled together on the abutment of the bridge, and telling each other long stories, Paul of his experiences at boarding-school, and Toni, stories of what Jacques had told him, and what Hermann had told him, and what the horses told him, and what he meant to be when he was a man. He confided to Paul the charm of learning to play the violin, and shocked Paul’s honest soul by the frank acknowledgment that learning the violin was a means to avoid going to work.
 
But this made no difference in Paul’s feelings. He hated dirty, idle boys in general, but loved the dirty, idle Toni, and, being by nature correct, methodical, and orderly, he adored the two most unconventional creatures ever put into this world, little Lucie Bernard and Toni.
 
In due time Lucie also came for her annual visit, accompanied by the wooden-faced Harper, the nursery governess. Lucie sometimes passed Paul in the street, and always bowed and smiled at him in the most captivating way, which caused Paul’s face to turn scarlet, and sent his boyish pulses galloping. He confided to his mother’s ear that Lucie had arrived, and for the fortnight that she stayed he haunted the park every afternoon. He was now promoted to long trousers, and felt his dignity very much. He longed for an opportunity to talk with Lucie, but as the case often is, all the arrangements for private interviews had to be made by the lady. Lucie was an ingenious little person, and not easily daunted, and it was not many days before she managed to escape from Harper’s eagle eye, and from Madame Ravenel’s gentle supervision, and to come upon Paul, walking soberly along the path, and secretly wishing for her.
 
“How do you do, Monsieur Verney?” said Lucie, dropping him a pretty little curtsey. “How tall you are!”
 
Paul bowed, and managed to say:
 
“You, too, have grown, Mademoiselle.”
 
“Indeed I have,” answered Lucie briskly, “and next year my hair is to be plaited.”
 
She shook her rich, brown locks that hung down to her waist, and were tied half-way with a bright scarlet ribbon, and Paul thought in his heart it was a shame to hide such beautiful hair in a plait, such as little Denise Duval wore, and the tailor’s children; and he much preferred Lucie’s hair hanging free, with the scarlet bow bobbing up and down. And then, the dancing scarlet bow seemed, in some way, to match her eyes, which had a gleam of fire in them and which were always dancing and full of life, and her little, sensitive mouth, which was always smiling.
 
“I hear you have been to boarding-school,” said Lucie.
 
 
“Yes, Mademoiselle,” answered Paul, quite timidly, as if he were the young lady, and Lucie the bold and ardent suitor.
 
“I suppose you think yourself quite a man.”
 
“Oh, no, Mademoiselle, I am only a boy yet.”
 
“I don’t go to school—I have masters,” said Lucie, “and a visiting governess who comes to the Château Bernard to teach me geography and history and things—but let me tell you, Paul,”—here Lucie dropped into a confidential tone and came quite close to Paul, and put her rosy lips to his ear, “I don’t like to learn anything except English and music. English is no trouble at all, because Sophie always spoke English to me, and I love music, although it is very hard work, but Sophie made me practise on the piano until I can play it quite well, but for the other things—I don’t care whether I know them or not. My governess goes and complains to grandmama that I won’t learn, and then grandmama sends for me and scolds me, and then I kiss her and tell her I will do better, and that makes grandmama happy—but I don’t care to learn out of books, Paul—that is the truth—I like to read stories, but they won’t let me read stories, not even Sophie.”
 
Paul looked at Lucie and sighed heavily. Was she another Toni, masquerading in girls’ clothes? He could not understand, to save his life, these children who did not like to study and learn, and why they would not try to please their governesses and parents by trying, nor could he understand why the two beings destined to be nearest to his soul should be so different in these respects from his ideals. Paul could not fathom this, but it troubled him very much indeed, and forthwith he said a few words to Lucie something like those he had said to Toni.
 
“Oh, Mademoiselle, one ought to learn—indeed one should—particularly if your grandmother and your sister Sophie wish you to do it. I don’t mind learning in the least—I am going into the army, and if I don’t study and can’t pass the army examinations, I shall have to be a clerk or something of that sort—my parents are not rich, you know—so I must learn all I can.”
 
“Tra la la,” cried Lucie, stopping in the path, and doing a skirt dance, fluffing her voluminous little skirts up and down as she had seen a young lady do at the circus; “you are a boy, and you have to learn. Who was that black-eyed, dirty little boyI saw walking with you on the street the other day?”
 
“That was Toni,” answered Paul, and proceeded to tell who Toni was.
 
“And is he fond of learning, too?” asked Lucie.
 
“Not a bit,” sighed Paul.
 
“Then he must be just like me.”
 
Paul burst into a sudden fit of laughter at the idea of Toni and Lucie being alike. Lucie seemed to him like a little princess out of a story-book.
 
“I will tell you what, Paul,” said she, “when I am eighteen, as I told you once before, I shall have heaps and heaps of money from America that I can do with as I please, and nobody can stop me, and I made up my mind, a long time ago, that I am coming to Bienville to live with Sophie and Captain Ravenel—oh, I do love them so much—they are so good to me! Then you will be an officer, and you will have a beautiful sword, and a helmet with a horse-hair plume in it like the officers I see walking about here, and then I shall go to a ball, and some one will bring you up and introduce you to me, and say, ‘Mademoiselle, may I introduce Lieutenant Verney?’ and then I shall bow to you as if I never saw you before, and then you will say, ‘Mademoiselle, will you do me the honor to give me this dance?’ and we shall dance together, and then when nobody can hear, we shall talk about having known each other always, and it will be our secret, and no one will know it but ourselves. Won’t it be charming?”
 
Paul looked at Lucie with a new, strange light in his eyes. Lucie, although quite unknown to herself, was much further along the path to womanhood than Paul was to manhood, but she seemed to be showing him some charming, prophetic vision.
 
“And you must not mention to a soul,” said Lucie, “that you ever spoke one word to me before, and I will not tell any one that I ever spoke one word to you before. I was afraid to tell Sophie that I had talked with you, because she would be vexed with me, and would not give me another chance to get away from her. So let us agree never to mention each other’s names to any one, but every summer we shall meet at Bienville, and then, when we are grown up, we shall be introduced, but we shall know each other all the time, and then when nobody is listening, I shall call you Paul and you will call me Lucie.”
 
More strange, new, delicious feelings crept into the boy’s heart as Lucie said these words. Paul and Lucie! He knew very well that when grown people called each other by their names they were very intimate, and how sweet it would be to know Lucie well enough for that; and besides, if they never called each other by their names except when they were alone, they would escape being teased. So Paul said, calling her for the first time by her name:
 
“Lucie, you won’t forget this, will you?”
 
“No, Paul,” said Lucie, suddenly dropping her gay and saucy air, and speaking quite sweetly and demurely.
 
And then, having turned a leaf in the book of life, they parted. Lucie heard Harper’s voice calling her, and Paul hurried away, his heart full of a singular rapture. How enticing the future looked to him! How he longed to be a man and an officer! And he meant to be a good officer, too, so that people would praise him to Lucie. He hurried through the park and past the edge of the town into the fields beyond, and on to the stone bridge, and, climbing up into the place where he and Toni had so often huddled together, sat there, lost in a delicious dream. It was an August afternoon, and the summer air was still and perfumed. In the purple woods on the other side of the water the birds were chirping sweetly, and under the bridge the little fishes were tumbling about in the dark water.
 
All these sights and sounds entered into the boy’s soul. The bell had been rung for the curtain to go up for this boy on the great tragi-comedy of human life. He sat there until the shadows grew long and the west was flaming, when, looking at the silver watch in his pocket, he realized that it was almost supper-time, and that he would have to run home to keep his mother from being uneasy. So he started at once.
 
As he scampered along the street in which Toni lived he saw, standing under an acacia tree close by Mademoiselle Duval’s shop, Toni and Denise Duval. Denise, as clean, as modest, as pretty as ever, was generously dividing a bun with Toni, and Toni—oh wonder!—was giving Denise two whole sticks of candy, only biting off one small piece for himself. Paul stopped, astounded at the spectacle. Usually it was Toni who gobbled up everything which Denise gave him, and now, oh, miracle, Toni was voluntarily giving up something to Denise. It was in truth an epoch-making day in Toni’s life!
 
During the rest of Lucie’s visit, she and Paul several times spoke together, and every time it was Paul who said to her:
 
“Lucie, don’t forget that when we grow up we are to call each other Paul and Lucie,”—and every time Lucie responded:
 
“Don’t you forget, Paul.”
 
Paul, who secretly mourned over Lucie’s depravity, talked to her quite seriously about refusing to learn geography and spelling and arithmetic and other rudiments of a young lady’s education. Lucie listened and, for the first time in her life, felt herself impelled by a will stronger than her own. None of the governesses and masters who had ever taught her had been able to impress her with the necessity of learning, nor, indeed, did Paul, for that matter, because Lucie by no means considered that geography and spelling and arithmetic were essential to a polite education. But Paul had an influence over her, nay, a sort of authority.
 
As Lucie gazed at him, she gradually acquired an expression that a dog has for a kind master. For the first time in her life she found it easier to give up her own will than to persist in it. This feeling was but a gleam, but it was not evanescent.
 
It was one of the happiest visits Lucie had ever paid in Bienville, for Sophie seemed a little more like her old self, and Captain Ravenel, too, was more cheerful. The story of the stand that Colonel Duquesne had taken about Madame Ravenel had leaked out mysteriously, and there was no danger of any further impertinence being offered Sophie Ravenel. The retired and blameless and self-sacrificing life the Ravenels led was beginning to be known. The ultra-virtuous still hounded Madame Ravenel over their tea-cups in the winter and their ices in the summer; but, although no one had invaded the retirement of the Ravenels so far, a number of people had begun the practice of speaking to them as they passed, and they were no longer avoided.
 
They even reached the point of courage to go sometimes and sit on the terrace, where the band played, and where the people sat at little tables, eating and drinking. One afternoon, shortly after Lucie had left, they were actually invited to sit at the same table with the Verneys. The Ravenels walked on the terrace, evidently looking for a table, but there was not a vacant one. There were, however, two unoccupied seats where Monsieur and Madame Verney and Paul sat, drinking eau sucré. The Ravenels were about to leave, when Madame Verney whispered something to her husband. Monsieur Verney at first shook his head, but Madame Verney persisted. That dream of her Paul marrying the beautiful, charming heiress into which Lucie Bernard was certain to develop had haunted the good woman’s brain, and she urged her husband, in a whisper, to invite the Ravenels to take the two vacant seats. Monsieur Verney, like a good, obedient husband, could not hold out long against his wife; and when the Ravenels passed, not dreaming that any one in Bienville would share a table with them, Monsieur Verney rose, and said politely:
 
“If you are looking for a place, Monsieur, there are two chairs vacant here—we shall be most happy if you will occupy them.”
 
Ravenel stopped, amazed, and the color poured into Sophie Ravenel’s beautiful, pale face, and in an instant more they were seated with the Verneys, the first social recognition they had had since that day when Delorme’s blow drove Sophie into Ravenel’s arms. After thanking Monsieur and Madame Verney, the Ravenels gave their modest order, and then, according to the polite manner of the French, they began to talk together.
 
Captain Ravenel at once recognized Paul, and made the boy’s heart leap with delight.
 
“And this young gentleman I recollect well, as having been most polite and attentive to Madame Ravenel once, when she fell ill in the park.”
 
The Verneys had known nothing of Paul’s share in that scene, and did not identify him at all with that memorable occasion which was known all over Bienville, when Sophie Ravenel had been so cruelly insulted. So Monsieur and Madame Verney beamed with delight while Captain Ravenel gravely thanked Paul.
 
The boy gazed at Madame Ravenel’s refined and melancholy beauty, and felt a renewal of the charm which she exercised over all sensitive natures. Then his heart began to beat furiously as his mother said:
 
“I have often admired, Madame, the little girl that I have seen with you in the park—your sister, I believe.”
 
“Yes,” replied Sophie, “my little half-sister, of whom I had the charge during all her babyhood, and who is like a child to both of us.”
 
“She is very, very pretty,” said Madame Verney, hoping that embodied prettiness would one day belong to her Paul, together with all that went with it.
 
“And very good-hearted,” replied Sophie, smiling. “She is not a French child—my stepmother was American, and Lucie is like her, unconventional and even wilful, but good and tender-hearted beyond any creature that I have ever known. She lives with our grandmother, and grandmothers, you know, are not very severe mentors, so I am afraid my little sister does not get as good discipline as she would have had if her mother had lived; and when she comes to visit us, Captain Ravenel spoils her so—”
 
Sophie stopped, turning her full, soft gaze on Captain Ravenel. She thought him the best, the noblest of men, and did not love him the less because he was so indulgent to Lucie.
 
Monsieur Verney, putting his hand on Paul’s shoulder, told Captain Ravenel that there was the future Murat of the French army. Paul’s father was always joking him, but the boy did not mind it in the least, and laughed at the notion of being a great cavalry officer.
 
“So you are going into the cavalry, eh?” asked Captain Ravenel. “Why not the artillery?” Ravenel himself had been an artillery officer.
 
“Because I am not clever enough, I am afraid,” replied Paul frankly; “an officer has to be very clever to be in the artillery—clever at his books, I mean, and I am not very clever at my books.”
 
“We do not complain,” said Monsieur Verney, in response to this speech, “he does very well at his books, but he has always wished to be in the cavalry, so I presume that is where he will land eventually.”
 
After a little while the Ravenels rose—they were not persons who outstayed their welcome—and went away with gratitude in their hearts to the Verneys. This was a little thing, but it was the entering wedge of something like social recognition in Bienville. The next time they met on the terrace, it was Monsieur Verney, who, with Madame, asked permission to sit at the table with the Ravenels. Captain Ravenel, in the course of the conversation, mentioned some pictures he had of the Arab tribesmen in Algeria. Monsieur Verney spoke of them to Paul next day, and the boy begged that he might ask Captain Ravenel to show him the pictures. Monsieur Verney consented, and that afternoon Paul, finding the Ravenels taking their accustomed walk, went up, and, according to his habit, blushing very much, said that his father had given him permission to ask Captain Ravenel to show him his Arab pictures. Captain Ravenel promptly appointed the next morning, after breakfast, and Paul presented himself at half after eleven. He was the first visitor of their own class who had darkened the door of the Ravenels since they came to Bienville.
 
Captain Ravenel not only showed him the pictures, but talked to him so interestingly that the boy went home captivated. Moreover, he told his father that some things, which seemed so hard for him to learn at school, Captain Ravenel had made quite clear to him, and it came to Monsieur Verney’s mind that it would be a good thing to get Captain Ravenel to coach Paul an hour or two every day during his holidays. Madame Verney rapturously approved of this. The vision of Lucie hovered over it all. The arrangement was soon made, and, during the rest of his holidays, for two hours every day, Paul sat with Captain Ravenel, in the garden on pleasant days, but in the salon when it was disagreeable, and studied mathematics and geography with him.
 
Never was there so attentive a boy, and the Verneys were charmed and delighted at the progress Paul made in his studies. He was naturally of a determined and plodding nature, and Ravenel was a good instructor, but there was another motive urging Paul on. Ravenel was Lucie’s brother-in-law, and when that glorious day came, when Lucie would be a young lady, living in Bienville, and Paul would be a young lieutenant of cavalry, calling her in public Mademoiselle Bernard, and in secret Lucie, it would be a very good thing for him to be in favor with Captain Ravenel, and also with Madame Ravenel. Paul’s politeness and courtesy, the promptness with which his cap came off his reddish hair when he saw Madame Ravenel, the way in which he flew to open the door or the gate for her, the gentleness of his behavior, made Sophie his friend as much as Captain Ravenel.
CHAPTER VIII
In spite of his two hours’ work every day with Captain Ravenel, Paul found plenty of opportunity still to be with Toni. They maintained their attitude of confidence toward each other as regarded their different lady-loves, and about this time Toni confessed to Paul that strange and thorough revolution that had taken place in his nature, by which he had, for the first time in his life, given to another person something which he might have gobbled up himself, in giving Denise nearly all of his two sticks of candy. Paul commended this highly in Toni, and said to him:
 
“Boys should always give girls the preference in things like that. My father always gives my mother all the chicken livers—that is the way with gentlemen. But, Toni,” added Paul frankly and seriously, “I am afraid you are not a gentleman, and never will be one.”
 
“No, indeed,” answered Toni, “I am no gentleman—I don’t want to be a gentleman—I am only Toni. But I like Denise almost as much as you do Mademoiselle Lucie. At first, I meant to marry Denise just because her aunt keeps a pastry shop, but now”—here Toni expanded his chest, and looked hard at Paul—“but now, I believe, that is, I almost believe, I could marry Denise even if her aunt didn’t keep a pastry shop. You see, Denise is so very clean, and I like clean little girls.”
 
Toni, at that moment, had gathered on his person all the dirt possible, in spite of the earnest efforts of Madame Marcel in a contrary direction. His hands were grimy, there was a smudge on his nose, and his blue overalls, which had been clean that very morning, were all mud and tatters. A more disreputable-looking boy than Toni did not exist in Bienville. Paul, realizing the incongruity between Toni’s sentiments and his appearance, burst out laughing, but Toni did not mind being laughed at, and grinned himself in sympathy.
 
“I know I am dirty,” he said, “but I don’t mind—I am no gentleman.”
 
Paul’s holidays were to end in September, and the Verneys, out of good-will to Captain Ravenel, and after much serious cogitation, invited Captain and Madame Ravenel to drink tea with them one [Pg 112]afternoon in their garden. It was a small thing, apparently, this drinking tea with the advocate and his wife, who were neither rich nor important people in Bienville, but it meant the rehabilitation of the Ravenels. In these years of seclusion, both of them had grown timid, and Sophie rather shrank from appearing once more in that world in which she had shone so beautifully; but Ravenel, through the point of view of a man of sense, desired Sophie to go, and his will was law with her.
 
So, on the afternoon before Paul left, the Ravenels went over, and in the little arbor in the Verneys’ garden had tea together. Paul made one of the party, and also Toni, unseen by anybody except Paul. There was a hole in the hedge, which was close to the summer-house, and outside that hole Toni crouched. At one or two points in the banquet, which consisted of cakes and fruit as well as tea, Paul made excuses to pass the hedge, and every time he handed through the hole a cake or some fruit to Toni, and, what was the strangest thing in the world, Toni ate the cakes himself and put the fruit into a paper bag which he had brought for the purpose. The third and last time, when Paul surreptitiously handed a couple of figs through the hole, Toni held up the bag and whispered, “For Denise.” Paul nearly dropped with astonishment.
 
But this was not the only surprise of the afternoon. The summer-house was near the open iron gate of the garden, and as the grown people were sitting, quietly chatting and drinking their tea, Colonel Duquesne passed by, and, stopping in front of the gate, tried to light his cigar, but used up the last match in his match-box without being able to do it. Then Monsieur Verney, who was the soul of good-will and hospitality, taking from the table some of the matches Madame Verney used for her tea-kettle, walked to the gate and offered them to Colonel Duquesne. There was a breeze stirring, enough to make it difficult to light a cigar out of doors, and Monsieur Verney invited Colonel Duquesne to come into the summer-house. The colonel, looking in and seeing Madame Verney smiling and bowing, and the Ravenels sitting there, accepted Monsieur Verney’s invitation and went in. Walking up, he spoke gallantly to Madame Verney, and to Captain and Madame Ravenel, quite as if he knew nothing about that past which had wrecked their lives. He did more: when Madame Verney pressed him to accept a cup of tea, he sat down at the tea-table, and made himself most agreeable, addressing Captain Ravenel without effusion, but quite as an old comrade in arms.
 
Such a thing neither of the Ravenels had ever hoped or looked for, and the Verneys, who were the best-hearted people in the world, were delighted at the success of their invitation.
 
Colonel Duquesne sat for half an hour and, at last lighting his cigar, he departed. As he went down the street, he shook his gray head and said to himself:
 
“If I had a wife or a daughter, what a wigging I should get when I go home!”
 
The next day, Paul was to go back to school, and early in the morning he and Toni had their last interview in the little cranny on the bridge. It was a beautiful, bright September morning, but both boys were rather low in spirits. No boy that ever lived, not even so excellent a one as Paul Verney, goes back to school with a light heart. But Paul made the best of it. Toni was depressed at the thought of being reduced again to the society of Hermann as the only person who could understand and reply to his talk; for although Jacques and the horses were equally as intelligent as Hermann, they were not so responsive.
 
“And now, Toni,” Paul urged, “pray try and learn to play the violin or do something to make a living.”
 
Toni shook his head dolefully.
 
“I don’t like making a living, and besides, if I marry Denise, what’s the use? Denise will take care of me—I know she will. She and my mother will make a living for me.”
 
Paul felt perfectly hopeless at this speech of Toni’s—there was no doing anything with him. Paul returned to school and Toni went back to his music lessons, but with no better success than before. He was now quite twelve years old, and he had become a public scandal in the town of Bienville. Even old Marie, who sat by the monument, scolded him for his idleness. At last, Madame Marcel, actuated by the press of public opinion, was forced to put Toni to work. As a great favor, Clery, the tailor, took Toni on trial, with a view to making him a professor of the sartorial art. Clery’s two sons, aged twelve and fourteen, could already make, each, a respectable pair of trousers, and Madame Marcel, tearfully laying aside her ambitions, implored Clery to make Toni a replica of the Clery boys.
 
Toni was frightened half to death at the prospect of going into a tailor’s shop, and his mother had literally to drag him there on the morning when he was to be inducted into his new profession. The shop was a small room, where two or three sewing-machines were perpetually going. There sat Clery and his two boys at work.
 
For the first week or two, Toni was employed in carrying parcels, which he found onerous enough. He had a way, however, of taking an hour to do an errand which ought only to have taken him ten minutes, and when during that first week in the tailor’s shop he was intrusted with a pair of Captain Ravenel’s well-worn trousers which had been pressed and cleaned, and it took him fifty-seven minutes to carry them from Clery’s shop to the Ravenels’ door, which was exactly four minutes away, Clery said that would never do.
 
As for Toni, these long absences from the shop meant getting back to his old haunts, and to the things he was not afraid of—the bridge by the river, and the sight of a cavalry troop going out for exercise, or a conversation with Jacques by way of encouragement. He had a feeling of terror when he sat in the shop with the tailor’s eye fixed on him, and the two boys, industriously sewing away on the sewing-machine, and eying him with contempt. He sat there, this wild and reckless Toni, who was thought to fear neither God, nor man, nor beast, the most frightened little boy imaginable. He could not have told, to save his life, what he was afraid of, but he knew that he was afraid—so much so that he stayed with Clery a whole year. In that time he learned absolutely nothing except to carry parcels, which he knew before.
 
If it had not been for the regard that Clery had for Madame Marcel, he would not have kept Toni a fortnight. As it was, he found it impossible to teach Toni the smallest thing about the tailoring trade. He could not operate a sewing-machine to save his life, nor learn to sew a stitch or to handle a smoothing-iron. Clery, who knew what a problem it was, thought long and anxiously over this problem of Madame Marcel’s. All through the winter days, he kept his eye on Toni, hoping that the boy might learn something; but when the leaves came in the spring, Toni knew no more about tail[Pg 118]oring than he did when the autumn winds swept the trees bare.
 
It was then May, and Toni was finding the confinement of the shop almost more than his soul could bear. It seemed to him impossible that such a life should continue, away from the fresh air, away from the damp, sweet-smelling earth, away from horses and troopers. He could not even see Denise, for Clery had taught him one thing, and that was not to loiter by the wayside, and sometimes a whole week would pass without his having a word with the lady of his love.
 
And Denise, with the clairvoyance of childhood, saw, in the troubled depths of Toni’s black eyes, that he was soul-sick, and in her tender heart she felt sorry for him. Sometimes she would lie in wait for Toni under the branches of the acacia tree, and hand him out a tart or a piece of ginger bread, but even this had no taste in Toni’s mouth—life was so dark and drear to him. How he longed for those happy days when he scraped and talked in Hermann’s garret, or those still better days, when there was no thought of work, and he could spend the whole day, if he liked, lying on his stomach on the parapet of the bridge and watch the silvery backs of the fishes as they tumbled about in the rippling water! It seemed to him as if Denise was the only soul in the world who understood and pitied him. Even his mother, who he had hoped would let him live in idleness all his days, had done this strange and cruel thing of trying to make him work. Paul Verney wished him to work, Clery made him work, the Clery boys openly despised him for not working. Only Denise, of everybody in the wide world, knew what Toni himself knew—that he was never meant to work.
CHAPTER IX
 Toni was now thirteen years old, and though short, was very lithe and well made. He had never been on a horse’s back since that glorious day when the old cavalry charger had run off with him, and he had not been able to enjoy the society of the horses much, or to lurk around the riding-school since his apprenticeship to Clery. On a certain May day which, although Toni did not know it, was a day of fate to him, he saw the greatest sight of his life—the debarkation of a circus company, with all its horses and other animals, at the little station in Bienville.
 
Toni had often seen recruits debark when they came to the cavalry school for instruction. Clumsy, awkward fellows they were—at first ridiculously uneasy on a horse, and often as much afraid of a horse as Toni was of people. And he had seen them return, fine, dashing-looking troopers, after having been licked into shape in the riding-school. He loved to see the horses led to the train—they were so intelligent, so orderly, and seemed like real comrades of the troopers. But he had never seen anything like the trained intelligence of the circus horses in his life, and on this May day, when he wandered down to the station and saw horses who obeyed the word of command, like human beings, in getting off the train and taking up their right places, he was astounded and delighted. Every boy in Bienville was at the station to see the circus arrive, but Toni, according to his habit, slunk off by himself. There were numerous cages of animals, in which the other boys took a much greater interest than in the horses, but the other animals were nothing to Toni, to whom the cult of the horse was everything.
 
He followed the circus people, at a respectful distance, to the large open field where they put up the tent, but the chief point of interest to him was the temporary canvas stables which were erected. He knew that it was time for him to go back to Clery’s, but he could not, to save his life, have torn himself away from the fascinating sights and sounds which surrounded him.
 
Everywhere was the bustle and well-regulated haste of such companies. The circus, which was really a small affair, had arrived in the morning, and the tent was up, and the performance ready to open by two o’clock. Toni spent the whole of the intervening time watching what was going on. Clery and the shop quite faded from his memory. He saw the circus riders come out of the dressing-tent, in their beautiful costumes of red and gold and pink and silver, a little tarnished, but glorious in Toni’s eyes, and he saw the horses gaily caparisoned and almost adored them.
 
If he had a single franc, he would be able to go into the tent, and see the performance, but he had not a franc, nor did he know where to get one, except—except—he knew where his mother kept a tin box full of francs. He was afraid to go to her and ask her for the franc, because he had not been near Clery’s shop that day, and if his mother once caught him she might send him back to the shop, and that would mean no circus for him that day. But it was so easy to open the box and take out a franc—a thing he had never done before or thought of doing. But, like Captain Ravenel and Sophie, there are moments in the lives of human beings when temptation overwhelms the soul. Toni, who was neither a thief nor a liar, became both, just as Captain Ravenel and Sophie Delorme had, in one desperate moment, trampled on the social law.
 
So Toni to, whom, in spite of his faults, deceit was as foreign even as it was to Paul Verney, conceived the thought of taking a franc out of his mother’s tin box. He sneaked back home, along by-lanes and garden walls, and crept in through the little back door which opened into the kitchen. His mother was in the front shop, and did not see him. As he stole softly up the narrow stair into the bedroom above, the sun was shining brightly, and the clock on the mantel pointed to half-past one. Toni always remembered this as an hour of fate.
 
The circus performance was to begin at two, and he barely had time to find the key which his mother kept under the bureau cover, and to unlock the press in which she kept her strong box, to find the key to the strong box hanging up on a nail inside the press, to open it and there, in a smaller tin box, to find many pieces of silver. Toni took out a single franc. He might have taken the whole box, but he never thought of it. It was not money he wanted, but a sight of the circus. He then closed and replaced the box, made everything as it was before, and, creeping down stairs, rushed off to thefield where the circus tent was up, his heart beating with a wild excitement which was not joy—neither was it pain.
 
The performance was almost ready to begin when Toni handed in his franc with a trembling hand. The place was full; everybody in Bienville seemed to be there, and many persons from the surrounding country, but Toni managed to slip himself between two stout peasant women with baskets in their laps, and contrived to see the whole performance without being seen. He gave himself up, à la Toni, to the enjoyment of the moment, putting off until four o’clock the hated interview with his mother and the still worse one that he must have with Clery.
 
 
 
But the circus to him was a sight well worth a dozen whippings. The view of the prancing horses, so wonderfully intelligent, the beautiful young ladies in gauze and spangles, the riders in their satin suits,—all were a dream to Toni. He did not see any of the grease spots on the costumes, nor the paint on the faces of the lovely young ladies; all was a foretaste of Paradise. It came to him in a moment what his real destiny was—to be a circus rider. At once his imagination seized upon it. He wondered himself that he had managed to exist so long without the circus. All that vaulting and jumping and leaping, that careering around on the backs of brave horses, must be heavenly—it could not possibly be work.
 
Toni saw himself, in imagination, one of those glorious beings. Two things only did not fit into this picture which he drew of his future—his mother and little Denise. He could not imagine either of them in the place of those short-skirted, fluffy-haired young ladies, with pink silk stockings and very stout legs.
 
Just before the end a pony was brought out which succeeded in throwing three clowns so successfully that the audience was in roars of laughter. The ring-master challenged any one present below a certain weight to come out in the ring and try to ride this astonishing pony. Toni, without his own volition, and knowing no more of what he was doing than a sleep-walker, wriggled out from between the two fat peasant women and got down in the sanded ring. There was a roaring in his ears and a blur before his eyes, and he could not have told how it was that he found himself upon the back of the kicking, plunging pony careering around that dazzling circle. All Toni knew was that he was the pony’s master. There was no shaking him off.
 
Shouts and cheers resounded, each increasing as the pony, still making desperate efforts to get rid of Toni, sped around the ring. But Toni held on as firmly and easily as if he had been born and bred in a riding-school. He had not the slightest sensation of fear, any more than on that day so long ago when the old cavalry horse had run away with him. The cheers and cries increased as the pony, realizing that Toni had the upper hand of him, came down to a steady gallop.
 
The ring-master advanced and cracked his whip a little, and Toni fully expected the pony to start anew the wild antics of the beginning. Instead of that, the pony came to a dead halt which was expected to throw Toni to the ground, but did not. He looked up, however, and caught sight of the ring-master standing close to him. He was a fierce-looking man with black eyes like Toni’s. The sight of those eyes waked all the cowardice in Toni’s nature. He thought he should have died of fright while that man was looking at him, and then it came over him that hundreds of eyes were looking at him all the time. He slipped off the pony’s back and like a hunted creature dashed toward the nearest opening of the tent and fled—fled homeward. He meant to creep up stairs and crawl under his little bed and stay there until his mother came up stairs, when he would catch her around the neck and tell her all about the franc and ask her, yes, actually ask her to give him a whipping just to restore things to their normal balance. He felt that he deserved five hundred whippings.
 
As he raced homeward, he passed Clery’s shop without looking that way. Suddenly Clery himself darted out and seizing him dragged him through the shop and into a little back room quite dark. Clery, who was an honest fellow, meant to do Toni the greatest service of his life, and said, holding him by the collar:
 
“Toni, you are a thief!”
 
Toni, in whose mind the paradise of circus land and the paroxysm of terror were rioting confusedly, looked dreamily at Clery, who looked back sternly at him. Toni remaining silent, Clery shook him, and hissed into his ear:
 
“You are a thief! You stole the money from your mother to go to the circus.”
 
Toni still said nothing, and Clery continued:
 
“When you did not come back, I knew that you had gone to the circus. I went over and spoke to your mother, and she told me she was sure you had not gone because you had no money. Then I saw you come back here, and go out again, and run away as fast as you could. I went over and told your mother that you had been in the house, but she declared that you had not. My boy Jean says he saw you running toward the house with both hands open and likewise your mouth, and come out of it holding a franc between your teeth. So Toni, you are a thief, and your mother, I am sure, will never love you again, and to keep you from being sent to prison for life, I mean to give you as good a whipping as I am able, for fear your mother will not do her duty by you, and when I am through, I will take you over to her, and when I tell the police—”
 
Clery paused. Toni was thoroughly awake and alive then. A thief! Tell the police! That meant prison to him. This awful vision drove everything else out of his mind. And then Clery, suddenly brandishing the cane, brought it down on Toni’s shoulders with all the strength of an able-bodied tailor. Toni uttered a half-shriek, but after that neither cried out nor wept, but bore stoically the blows that Clery rained upon him. It seemed as if the day of judgment had come.
 
When Clery, honest man, had finished with Toni and was taking him across the street, Toni looked around him with wild eyes of despair. That precious refuge under his little bed seemed no longer open to him. He was a thief—he must go to prison—that was all he knew. And just then he looked up and there was a policeman walking straight toward him. That was enough! Toni, wresting himself from Clery’s grasp, turned and ran like one possessed, the specter of a mad fear chasing him, down toward the bridge. He was afraid to crawl into his usual nook, because he could be easily seen from there, so he ran across the bridge and hid himself in a thicket of young chestnut trees on the other side.
 
He lay, terror stricken, his heart beating so that he thought it must almost make a hole in the ground. What was to become of him? His mother, as Clery had told him, could love him no longer. He dared not look any one in the face, but felt an outcast, like Cain. He lay there for hours, through the waning afternoon, until the purple shadows descended on the white town, on the sparkling river, the long rows of barracks and the open fields in which the circus tent had been pitched. It was now taken down and the circus people were preparing to go by the highway to the next town, ten miles away.
 
It was nearly eight o’clock and the young moon was trembling in the heavens, when the circus cavalcade began to travel along the white and dusty highroad, passing by Toni’s place of concealment. It suddenly came into his mind that the only thing for him to do was to go with the circus. As the end of the procession of carts and vans and horsemen and horsewomen passed, Toni crept out of his hiding-place and came up to a company of men who were trudging along on foot. He said to one of them, Nicolas by name, a youngish man with hair and beard as red as Judas’:
 
“May I walk a little way with you?”
 
This little way, in Toni’s mind, meant to walk through life with the circus company.
 
Nicolas laughed; runaway boys were the general concomitants of a circus company. And in a moment more he recognized the boy who had stuck on the pony’s back, and then had run away so quickly.
 
“Yes, come along, you young rascal,” he said, “and you can carry this portmanteau if you like,”—and he slung the heavy portmanteau from his own shoulders to Toni’s.
 
Toni trudged along, carrying the portmanteau easily, being a strong boy. He got into a conversation with his new friend and soon expressed his determination to stay with the circus, if only they would give him something to eat, for he was very hungry. A woman, walking along with them, heard this and handed Toni a couple of biscuits, which he eagerly devoured. They trudged on for two hours, the moon growing larger and brighter and flooding with a white radiance the hedges, the wide fields, the woods and the highway along which the cavalcade traveled slowly. Toni felt an immense sense of relief. The police could not come so far to get him. He hardened his heart against his mother. He judged, from what Clery had told him, that his mother would be the first to denounce him.
 
And so began poor Toni’s life with the circus, away from his mother, away from Denise, away from Paul Verney—only Jacques remained.
CHAPTER X
 Seven years afterward, Toni found himself one day at the little town of Beaupré, in the valley of the Seine, where the circus was performing, for Toni had remained with it all that time. Beautiful young ladies in spangles had come and gone, demigods in red satin with white sashes had done the same. Toni himself was a demigod in red satin and a white sash, and was the crack rider of the circus. He had a large head-line of letters a foot high all to himself—Monsieur Louis D’Argens he was called on the bill-boards, although everybody about the circus called him Toni. Toni was then twenty years old and at least twenty years wiser than he had been seven years before. One does not spend seven years in the circus without learning many things. He learned all the immense wickednesses as well as the immense virtues which may be found in the lower half of humanity.
 
But, like most demigods, Toni was not happy. Perhaps it was a part of the general quarrel which every human being has with fate. But Toni’s principal quarrel was that he was haunted with fears of all sorts. This madcap fellow, this daring bareback rider, this centaur of a man, to whom nothing in the shape of horseflesh could cause the slightest tremor, who could ride four horses at once and could do a great many other things requiring vast physical courage, coolness and resolution, was, morally, as great a coward as he had been in the old days when he ran away from all the boys in Bienville except Paul Verney, and ran away from home rather than face his mother after having taken a single franc. He was mortally afraid of a number of persons: of Clery, the tailor in far-off Bienville, for fear he might set the police on him; of Nicolas, who had the upper hand of him completely, and of a friend of Nicolas’, Pierre by name, who was the most complete scoundrel unhung except Nicolas himself. Both of these two men Toni could have whipped with one hand tied behind his back, for he was unusually muscular and, though somewhat short, a perfect athlete. His two scampish friends, Nicolas and Pierre, were wretched objects physically, such as men become who are born and bred in the slums, who have behind them a half-starved ancestry going back five hundred years, and who are on intimate terms with the devil. For a circus rider may practise every one of the seven deadly sins with perfect impunity except one, that of drunkenness. A circus rider must be sober.
 
They had drawn Toni into many a scrape, but here again Toni’s strange cowardice had saved him from taking an actual part in any wrong-doing. He watched out for Nicolas and Pierre, at their bidding, he knew of their wrong-doing, where they kept their stolen gains, how they cheated the manager, how they abused the women. But Toni himself, although the associate of two such rogues and rascals, and in many ways their blind tool, had kept himself perfectly free from the commission of any crime or misdemeanor. His heart remained good—poor Toni!
 
He still hankered, mother-sick, for Madame Marcel. Once every year since he had run away he had written to her as well as he could, for Toni’s literary accomplishments were very meager, a letter all tear-stained, telling her he was well and trying to behave himself, and he hoped she did not have rheumatism in her knees and that he was sorry for having stolen the franc. He even sent her a little money once a year, which Madame Marcel did not need, but which Toni did, and in these letters he always sent his love to Denise, but he never gave his address nor any clue to his employment. He was afraid to give any address for her to answer his letter, and so did not really know whether his mother were alive or dead.
 
His heart still yearned unceasingly after Paul Verney, the friend of his boyhood; and none of the young ladies in tights and spangles had been able to put out of his mind little Denise in her blue-checked apron, and her plait of yellow hair hanging down her back, and her downcast eyes and sweet way of speaking his name. He never heard the church-bells ringing on a Sunday morning that his Bienville Sundays did not come back to him—his mother washing and dressing him for church; the sight of Denise, in her short white frock, trotting along solemnly with her hand in Mademoiselle Duval’s; Paul Verney smartly dressed and hanging on to his father’s arm; Madame Ravenel, in her black gown, standing just inside the church door, with Captain Ravenel, grave and stern-looking, standing outside—and then the world in which Toni lived seemed like a dream, and this dream of Bienville the only solid reality.
 
One friend remained to him, the ever-faithful Jacques, now battered almost beyond the semblance of a soldier. Toni continued his friendship for horses. Half of his success with them came from the perfect understanding of a horse’s heart and soul which Toni possessed. The other half came from that strange and total absence of fear where actual danger was concerned. When the circus tent caught fire in the midst of a crowded performance, Toni was the calmest and most self-possessed person there, and careered around the ring doing his specialty, a wonderful vaulting and tumbling act, while the canvas roof overhead was blazing and no one but himself saw it. When the bridge broke through, with the circus train upon it, Toni was the first man to pull off his clothes and jump into the water, and assisted in saving half a dozen lives. He was regarded somewhat as a hero and daredevil, while secretly he knew himself to be the greatest coward on the face of the earth. Nicolas and Pierre knew this weakness of Toni’s from the beginning and traded on it most successfully.
 
The company was performing in the fields outside of Beaupré, but as they were playing a whole week’s engagement in the town, some of them were quartered in the little hamlet close by. Within sight of the hamlet’s church-spire was a beautiful château standing all white and glistening in the sunlight, surrounded by prim and beautiful gardens watched over by sylvan deities in marble. On the broad terrace a fountain plashed, and lower down a beautifully-wooded park stretched out. Over the stone gateway leading into the park were the words “Château Bernard.”
 
The first time Toni saw this was when he was on his way to the midday performance in the town of Beaupré. He stopped, and the meaning of that name flashed into his mind in a second. Little Lucie, that charming little fairy whom Paul Verney loved so much, and of whom he had confided, blushingly and stumblingly, some things to Toni in those far-off days at Bienville, seven years before, when he and Paul had sat cuddled together on the abutment of the bridge,—the sight of the name “Château Bernard” brought all this back to Toni.
 
It was a beautiful, bright spring morning, like those mornings at Bienville, except that to Toni the sun never shone so brightly anywhere as it had [Pg 138]shone at Bienville. He stopped and gazed long at the château, his black eyes as soft and sparkling as ever they had been, although now he was a man grown. But there was an eternal boyishness about him of which he could no more get rid than he could cease to be Toni. There had not been a day in all the years since he left Bienville that he had not thought of Paul Verney, and thinking of Paul would naturally bring to his mind the beautiful little Lucie who was like a dream maiden to him—not at all like Denise, who was to him a substantial though charming creature. He reckoned that Lucie must be now twenty, and Paul must be a sublieutenant.
 
As Toni stood there, his arms crossed, and leaning on the stone wall, he heard the clatter of horses’ hoofs, and down the avenue came three riders, a young girl and her escort in front and a groom behind. As they dashed past Toni, he recognized, in the slight, willowy figure in the close-fitting black habit and coquettish hat, Lucie Bernard, a young lady now, but the same beautiful, joyous sprite she had been ten years before in the park at Bienville. The cavalier riding with her was, like Toni, below middle size, but, unlike Toni, light-haired and blue-eyed, not handsome, but better than handsome—manly, intelligent, clear of eye, firm of seat, full of life and energy, and with an unstained youth. It was—it was—Paul Verney.
 
As the two flashed past, followed by the groom, Toni almost cried aloud in his agony of joy and pain, but he dared not run after them and call to them. They, of course, knew that he had run away from Bienville because he was a thief. That theft of a franc was perpetually gnawing at Toni’s heart. The sight of Paul Verney seemed to show him the gulf between them. Toni stood, leaning on the wall, his head hanging down, his mind and soul in a tumult, for a long time, until presently the sound of a clock striking through the open window of the keeper’s house aroused him to the knowledge that it was almost time for the circus to begin. He ran nearly all the way to Beaupré, for he worked as honestly at his trade of a circus rider—only it did not seem like work to Toni—as Paul Verney did at his as a sublieutenant of cavalry.
 
But all that day, through the performance, during the intermission, and at the afternoon performance and in the evening, when Toni went back to his little lodging in the village, the vision haunted him. Lucie and Paul looked so young, so happy, so fresh, so innocent! They had not behind them anything terrifying. Neither one of them had ever stolen anything, unless it was the other’s heart. They had no Nicolas and Pierre to make them stand watch while thefts were being committed—to make them lie in order to shield rascally proceedings—always to be threatening them with exposure.
 
Toni was so tormented by these thoughts that he lay on his hard little bed in his garret lodging, wide-awake, until midnight and then he was roused from his first light sleep by a pebble thrown at his window. Toni waked, started up in his bed and shuddered. That was the sign that Nicolas and Pierre wanted him. They were his masters; he knew it and they knew it. He got up obediently, however, slipped on his clothes, and went down the narrow stair noiselessly. Outside were his two friends.
 
“Come along,” said Nicolas.
 
“Where are you going?” weakly asked Toni.
 
“We will tell you when we get there,” replied Pierre, with a grin.
 
There was no moon, and the night was warm and sultry, although it was only May. Toni followed his two friends along the highroad. Nicolas and Pierre spoke to each other in low voices, and Toni easily made out that they were engaged on a scheme of robbery. At that his soul turned sick with horror. He had never robbed anybody of a single centime except that one solitary franc which he had taken from his mother, but he knew more about robberies than most people. The bare thought of them always frightened him inexpressibly, but he continued trudging along without making any protest.
 
Presently they came to the stone wall around the park of the Château Bernard, over which they all scrambled and made straight for the château. Everything was quiet about it and apparently every one was asleep, except in one room on the ground floor. There were some gigantic, luxuriant lilac bushes, now in all their glory of bloom and perfume, and under these the three crept. Never again could Toni smell the lilac blooms without being overcome by a sickening recollection. The window was open, and within the small and luxuriously-furnished room they could see an old lady, very splendidly dressed, and a man of middle age. Toni at once recognized her from the description which Paul and Lucie had given him so many years before. Madame Bernard was very large, tall and handsome, and sterner in aspect than both old Marie, who sat by the monument at Bienville, and the monument itself. She was by far the grandest-looking person Toni had ever seen, and he did not suspect that she was as great a coward in her way as he was in his. Courage is a very variable quantity and subject to mysterious ebbs and tides.
 
Some gold and bank-notes were on a table before them, and the old lady was saying, weeping a little as she spoke:
 
“I think you have behaved to me most cruelly, Count Delorme. Whatever Sophie’s faults were, you got, at least, the benefit of her entire fortune, which you squandered in your five years of marriage. Now you come here, when my little Lucie is at an age to be damaged by raking up this old story about Sophie, although you promised me, if I would give you two thousand francs a year, that you would never show yourself in this part of the country.”
 
“I am obliged to show myself,” responded Delorme, a thin-lipped, hawk-eyed man, who looked the villain he was. “What are two thousand francs a year? My cigars cost me almost as much as that. And as for Sophie’s fortune—well, a woman like that was dear at any price. If I had not got it, Ravenel would, and I should not think that you would be particularly proud of him as a grandson-in-law.”
 
“I am not,” responded old Madame Bernard weakly, and then summoning something of dignity, added, “but I venture to say that he is a better man than you are, Count Delorme. At least, he has been far more considerate of the feelings of Sophie’s family, and has kept himself and her in the strictest seclusion, nor have they asked me for a franc. I think, also, that the Ravenels still have many friends, while I am not aware of a single one that you have, Count Delorme.”
 
In answer to this, Delorme coolly picked up the notes and money, and, without counting either, stuffed them in his pocket. Madame Bernard made a faint protest. “There is much more there,” she cried, “than two thousand francs. I did not mean to give you all.” But Delorme, rising and taking his hat, walked out of the room, and let himself out of the house by a small side door.
 
Toni knew then what his friends were up to. The three followed Delorme through the park, Toni lagging behind. Presently, in a dark place overhung by a clump of cedars, they came upon Delorme, who had every vice except that of cowardice. He turned on them and said, in a threatening voice:
 
“What do you mean by following me, fellows?”
 
For answer, Pierre and Nicolas fell upon him, Nicolas striking him a violent blow on the head with a short, loaded cudgel. Delorme fell over without a word, and in a minute his pockets were rifled. Toni stood by, dazed and unable to move. It was all over in less than two minutes, and the three were running away as fast as they could. Toni knew that Delorme was dead, lying in the roadway in the dark, his face turned upward toward the night sky, himself robbed of the money of which he had robbed Madame Bernard.
 
CHAPTER XI
 Next morning, by daylight, the whole region was aroused. Count Delorme had been found dead, robbed and murdered, in the park of the Château Bernard. The police appeared in swarms. No one had seen him at the château, and old Madame Bernard had fainted when told of the murdered man being found in the park, and had taken to her bed very ill, so she could not be disturbed. Delorme’s identity was easily established, and it was surmised that he was on his way to the château when he had met his fate.
 
Toni listened, with a blanched face, to all the excited talk and colloquy that went on among the villagers as well as the circus people about the strange murder. Suspicion at once fell on the circus people, but Pierre and Nicolas were old hands at the business and knew how to manage such little affairs. They had promptly proceeded, the first thing next morning, to try for an advance of money from the manager of the circus, and being refused, they had tried to borrow money from several of their fellow employees to disguise the fact that their pockets were well-lined at that very moment with Delorme’s money. Toni had never thought of this subterfuge, and did not attempt to borrow a franc. He spent the day in one long spasm of terror, and in the evening, when the performance was over and he was going back to his lodging, his two friends joined him.
 
“Toni,” said Nicolas, with a laughing devil in his eye as he spoke, “you must be very careful, for suspicion might fall on you for the part you took in our little escapade. You struck the blow, you know.”
 
Toni stopped, stared, and threw his arms up above his head in a wild passion of despair.
 
“I did not—I did not—I did not,” he cried.
 
Then Nicolas, slipping his hand in Toni’s pocket, drew out a twenty-franc gold piece, a coin which Toni had seldom in his life owned.
 
“This was what you took out of the man’s pocket,” said Pierre. It was too much for Toni. They were walking along the highway toward the village, in the soft May evening. Toni, quite unsteady on his legs, sat down by the roadside. He was so stunned and dazed that he could neither move nor think nor speak. Pierre and Nicolas walked off laughing, Pierre, meanwhile having put the twenty-franc piece in Toni’s pocket. When Toni felt this, he threw the money after them frantically, and it fell in the road behind them, but they did not see it. Toni, without knowing this at the time, thereby accomplished a stroke of justice to these wretches.
 
He sat there a long time after his two friends had left him. Presently the power of thought returned to him, and he said to himself:
 
“Toni, here is another terrible secret for you to carry—heavier than any yet that you have carried—too heavy for you to carry alone. Toni, you are a coward. If you were not, you would have got away from Nicolas and Pierre a long time ago. Now see what they have led you into. Toni, you must go to Paul Verney and make a clean breast of it, otherwise, you will live to be guillotined.”
 
He had no friend to whom he could go for counsel, unless he could find Paul Verney. He took Jacques out of his pocket, and Jacques looked at him in a friendly way and agreed with him as he always did, saying:
 
“Toni, unless you take some steps you will certainly be guillotined or sent to prison for life; so make up your mind to find Paul Verney and tell him all about it.”
 
Toni took this resolution, but the courage which inspired him to make it did not inspire him, at once, to carry it into effect. He meant to do it the first thing next day, but when the next morning came he put it off until the afternoon, and when the afternoon came he again delayed. A secret like that is frightful to keep and more frightful to tell. And then suddenly their week was up at Beaupré.
 
After leaving Beaupré, they gave performances in the small towns round about. Interest in the murder of Delorme had by no means died out, but rather increased as time passed on and no clue to the murderer was discovered. Toni had an instinctive feeling that the police were watching the circus people. He felt that every one of them was under suspicion, but he had no tangible proof of this. It made him long, however, to get away from the circus. He knew that he was of an age when his army service might begin at any moment, as his twentieth birthday was close at hand. He had, in fact, already been served with notice. He could have got off, being the only son of a widowed mother, but it had occurred to him that by serving his time in the army he might get rid, for a while, of his two friends, Nicolas and Pierre. A dream came to him that after his service he would get a place as teacher in a riding-school. Then he would still have horses for his friends and companions, but there would be nothing of Nicolas and Pierre in his life. The dream grew brighter the more he dwelt on it. He would go back to Bienville and ask his mother’s pardon, which he had done in every letter that he had written her, and then she would forgive him. And he would make her ask for the hand of Denise for his wife.
 
Oh, how happy he could be if only he had not this terrible secret about Count Delorme to carry, which stayed with him day and night. If he could get away from the circus, he thought this secret might then be less terrible to bear. The first step toward this was soon accomplished by the strong arm of the law, because Toni found himself, one June morning, drawn in the conscription. He had no thought of getting off, because he was his mother’s only son, and presently he found, to his immense joy, that he was to be one of the number of recruits who were to report at the cavalry depot at Beaupré.
 
Beaupré was like Bienville in one way, having a small garrison and being a cavalry depot, but it was new and modern, unlike Bienville. Although quite as bright, the barracks and stables were all new and shining with fresh paint. And oh, what joy was Toni’s when he recalled that Paul Verney was stationed there! It seemed to him as if what is called the good God, who had neglected and forgotten him for seven whole years, had at last relented and was directing his destiny and showing him the path to peace.
 
It was almost two months after Toni’s little adventure in the park of the Château Bernard that, one morning, Sergeant Duval, the father of Denise, heaved a heavy sigh as he paced the tan-bark in the riding-school at Beaupré and mournfully surveyed the group of recruits who were to take their first lesson in voltige or circus riding. There were about fifty of them. They all came from Paris, and recruits from Paris are notoriously hard to break in. They feel a profound contempt for the “rurals,” a term which they apply to everybody outside of Paris. The sergeant, running his eye over them, had no difficulty in sorting them out, so to speak, according to their different degrees of incapacity. About half were clerks, waiters, and artisans’ apprentices, town-bred and certain never to get over their fear and respect for horses. The other half were porters and laborers and the like, who could be taught to stick on a horse’s back, but would never acquire any style in riding.
 
Among them was a stupid-looking young fellow, rather short but well-made, with very black eyes and a closely-cropped black poll, whom Sergeant Duval did not recognize in the least as his old friend Toni, the unknown aspirant for the hand of Denise. Toni’s apparent fear and dread in the company of the horses had kept the troopers in a roar of laughter ever since he had joined. His awkwardness in the simple riding lesson of the day before showed what a hand he would make of it in the more difficult voltige, and his companions had hustled him to the first place in the line, so they could see the fun.
 
Just then Sublieutenant Verney walked into the riding-hall. He was the same Paul Verney, only he was twenty-two years old, and was known and loved by every man and by every horse in the regiment. This triumph was something to be laid at the feet of Lucie Bernard, whom he had loved ever since that August afternoon in the park at Bienville, when she had taken his book away from him and his heart went with the book. Sublieutenant Verney was always present at the riding-drill, whether it was his turn or not, and he dreamed dreams in which he saw himself as another Murat or Kellerman, leading vast masses of heavy cavalry to overwhelm infantry—for he held to the French idea that men on horses can ride over men on foot. His dog, Powder, a smart little fox terrier, was at his heels.
 
Now Paul Verney was an especial favorite with Sergeant Duval, who had known him as boy and man, who had seen sublieutenants come and go, and knew the breed well. He looked gloomily at Paul as he came up and ran his eye casually over the recruits.
 
“Pretty bad lot, eh, Sergeant?” said Paul.
 
“Dreadful, sir. It would have broken your heart to have seen them in the riding-school yesterday. Not one of them has any more notion of riding than a bale of hay has.”
 
“Ah! Well, you can lick them into shape, if anybody can,” was Paul’s reply to this pessimistic remark.
 
The specially-trained horse on which greenhorns learned was then brought in. He was an intelligent old charger, and when he stood stock-still, with a trooper holding up his forefoot, his small, bright eye traveled over the recruits. Then, suddenly dropping his head, he gave forth a long, low whinny of disgust, which was almost human in its significance.
 
“Old Caporal even laughs at them!” cried the sergeant. “Now, come here, you bandy-legged son of a sailor, and get on that horse’s back, and do it with a single spring.”
 
This was addressed to Toni, who lurched forward so clumsily that it was seen there was little hope for him.
 
The waiting greenhorns watched with a sympathetic grin Toni’s timid and awkward preparations to spring on Caporal’s back. He moved back at least ten yards, and, lunging forward with the energy of despair, succeeded in landing on the horse’s crupper, from which he slid to the ground, and lay groaning as he rubbed his shins. A shout of laughter, in which every man joined except the sergeant, followed this. Even Powder gave two short, sharp yaps of amusement. The sergeant, though, was in no laughing mood.
 
“Now, then,” he cried, “are you going to keep us here all day? Get up and try again!—and this time, be sure and land between the horse’s ears.”
 
Thus adjured, Toni, still rubbing his shins, got up, and going still farther off, made another clumsy rush. This time, by scrambling with both hands and feet, he managed to get on Caporal’s back, and then, working forward, he perched himself almost astride the horse’s neck, and said with a foolish smile:
 
“I can’t get any farther forward, sir.”
 
“Get off!” roared the sergeant.
 
Toni worked backward as he had worked forward, and slid down behind. Old Caporal, at this, made a disdainful motion with his hind leg, and Toni, with a scream, bolted off, yelling: “Take care! take care! he’s beginning to kick.”
 
The recruits had something else to think of now in their own efforts to vault on Caporal’s back. Some of them were awkward enough, but all did better than Toni. Then came the mounting and dismounting while the horse was galloping round in a circle, the sergeant standing in the middle with a long whip to keep him going.
 
Toni, meanwhile, had stood with his heart in his mouth, watching Paul Verney. There was not, on Paul’s part, the slightest recognition of his old friend. Toni’s shock of black hair, which was as much a part of him as his black eyes and Jacques in his pocket, had been closely-cropped, and he had grown a black mustache, which quite changed the character of his face, and he looked away from Paul Verney, not wishing for recognition at that time and place.
 
Toni was also the first man to attempt the mounting and dismounting. He ran around the circle twice before he seemed to screw up enough courage to try to mount, and could not then until the sergeant’s long whip had tickled his legs sharply. In vain he clutched at the horse’s mane, and made ineffectual struggles. Once he fell under Caporal’s feet, and only by the horse’s intelligence escaped being trodden on.
 
“If the horse were as great a fool as you are,”—roared the sergeant.
 
Crack went the sergeant’s whip as Toni got on his legs. Timidity and stupidity have to be gotout of any man who has to serve in a dragoon regiment, and the sergeant proceeded to take them out of Toni.
 
“Look here, my man,” he said, “you have got to learn to do that trick now and here—do you understand?”
 
“But, Sergeant,” moaned Toni, “I am afraid of the horse, I swear I am—”
 
The sergeant’s reply to this was to run toward Toni with uplifted whip. Old Caporal, supposing the whip was meant for him, suddenly broke into a furious gallop. Toni darted toward him, lighted like a bird with both feet on the horse’s back, folded his arms, stuck his right leg out as Caporal sped around the circle, changed to his left, turned a somersault, stood on his head on the horse’s back for a whole minute, and then with a “Houp-la!” flung himself backward to the ground, and, approaching the sergeant, stood calmly at attention. The roof of the riding-hall echoed with thunders of laughter and applause, Sublieutenant Verney leading off, capering in his delight, and pinching Powder to make him join his yelping to the uproar. The sergeant stood grinning with satisfaction. He was one of the few sergeants who wanted a man to ride well and cared very little what share of praise or blame accrued to himself in the doing of it.
 
“So you were in the circus?” he asked.
 
“Yes, Sergeant—ever since I was thirteen,” answered Toni, who had thrown off his stupid expression like a mask and stood up alert, cool, with a glint of a smile in his eye. Then he stopped. He had not forgotten those magnanimous offers made by the sergeant to his mother to marry her for the purpose of thrashing him. His old cowardice returned to him and he trembled at the idea of the coming recognition by the sergeant. He certainly would not consider a circus rider a match for Denise, who, by this time, must be a young lady.
 
The seven years which had changed Toni and Paul from boys into men, had apparently passed over the sergeant without leaving the smallest sign on him, but they had marked Toni so that Sergeant Duval so far had no idea that he was the Toni whom he had yearned to thrash.
 
A light had been breaking upon Paul Verney’s mind. There had been something strangely familiar in the awkward recruit. A thrill of remembrance swept over Paul Verney, but Bienville and Toni were far from his mind then, and besides, Toni, as a dirty, shock-headed boy, had been the personification of boyish grace, while this fellow had been the embodiment of awkwardness in walking as well as riding. But now things began to grow clearer. As for Toni, the old joy and love of Paul came over him with a rush. He straightened himself up, stood at attention, and turned his gaze full on the young lieutenant.
 
Paul came up close to him.
 
“Isn’t this—isn’t this Toni?” he asked.
 
For answer, Toni saluted and said, “Yes, sir.” He had learned enough, during his short enlistment, to say that. And then, surreptitiously opening his hand, Paul caught a glimpse of the old battered Jacques in Toni’s palm. He covered it up quickly again. Paul Verney could not trust himself with all the recruits standing by, and the riding lesson in progress, to say more than:
 
“Come to my quarters at twelve o’clock,”—and turned away.
 
Sergeant Duval then recognized Toni, and with severe disapproval.
 
“So you have turned up at last!” he said sternly, “while your poor mother has been breaking her heart in Bienville these seven years about you.Well, I will talk with you later. I don’t suppose you learned any good in the circus except how to ride.”
 
But this could not crush Toni. He had felt all his perplexities and miseries dwindle since he had spoken to Paul Verney. Paul always had such a sensible, level head, and knew well that plain, straight path out of difficulties—telling the truth and standing by the consequences.
CHAPTER XII
 At Paul Verney’s quarters, therefore, on the stroke of twelve, Toni presented himself. He had laid aside his pretended awkwardness and when he stood, erect and at attention, in his dragoon uniform, he was a model of lithe and manly grace. His circus training had developed his naturally good figure, and he was as well built a young fellow as one would wish to see. He was handsome, too, in his own odd, picturesque way. His teeth were as white as ever and shone now in a happy grin, while his black eyes were full of the mingled archness and softness that had distinguished the dirty little Toni of ten years before.
 
Paul was as happy as Toni, and the two eyed each other with delight when they were alone. Paul stepped softly to the door and, locking it, held out his arms to Toni, and the two hugged each other as if they were ten years old, instead of being twenty and twenty-two.
 
“And now, Toni,” said Paul, “tell me all that you have been doing. I don’t suppose you learned anything good in the circus except riding.”
 
“That’s just what Sergeant Duval said to me,” replied Toni, and then the memory of all he had suffered since his association with Pierre and Nicolas came to his mind and his expressive eyes glowed.
 
“It is true, Pa—I mean, Lieutenant, that I got into bad company when I was in the circus, and I want to tell you all about it. But first tell me something about Bienville. I have written regularly to my mother, but I was afraid to give her my address.”
 
“Afraid of what?” asked Paul.
 
Toni’s eyes wandered around the room aimlessly, and came back to Paul’s.
 
“I always was afraid,” he said.
 
“Your mother is alive and well,” said Paul, “but heart-broken about you. What induced you, Toni, to run away as you did?”
 
“Because—because—” That one franc still loomed large in Toni’s mind. “I took a franc from my mother—only a single franc, to go to the circus, and Clery, the tailor, caught me and accused me of taking the money and whipped me and said he would have me arrested and then—oh, I was so frightened! I have been frightened every time I thought of that franc in these more than seven years.”
 
“Some story of the sort got out,” answered Paul, “but your mother always denied it. I don’t really think she missed the franc that you took out of the box. But Toni, what a fool you were—what a monumental fool you were.”
 
Toni shook his head. “And a coward, too, sir,” he said. It was very difficult to add that “sir” when he spoke to Paul, and equally strange for Paul to hear.
 
“Look here, Toni, don’t call me ‘sir’ when we are alone—I can’t stand it. As soon as we step outside in the corridor it shall be ‘my man’ and ‘sir,’ but when the door is locked we are Paul and Toni.”
 
Toni nodded delightedly. “It never would have worked,” he said, “when the door is locked on us.”
 
“I never could understand that cowardice in you,” said Paul. “You were the most timid boy I ever saw in my life about some things, and the most insensible to fear about others.”
 
“I know it, but the reason why you can’t understand it is because you are not afraid of anything. I am not afraid of horses, nor of railroad wrecks—I have been in one or two and was not frightened—nor fires, nor—nor any of those things which come on a man unawares and where he has just to stand still, keep cool and do what he is told to do. But when it comes to other things, like going against another man’s will—oh, Paul—I am the biggest coward alive and I know it. I would never volunteer for the forlorn hope, but if there was an officer by the side of me with a pistol I’d march to the mouth of hell, because I would be more afraid of the officer than I would be of hell. That’s the sort of courage I have,” and Toni grinned shamelessly. “But before I tell you all of the evil things that have befallen me, tell me some more about Bienville. How does my mother look?”
 
“About twenty-five years older since you left. And Toni, you must write to her this very day—do you understand me?—to-day, and I shall write to her that she may get our letters together.”
 
“I will,” answered Toni. “And how about little Denise?”
 
As Toni said this, he blushed under his sunburned skin, and Paul laughed. They were both very young men and their thoughts naturally turned in the same direction.
 
 
“Denise is here with her father. Mademoiselle Duval has sold out the bakery shop, so I suppose you will no longer be in love with Denise.”
 
Toni giggled like a school-girl.
 
“To tell you the truth,” he said, “I never have thought about any girl except Denise, but I can only think of her now as a little creature in a checked apron with her flaxen plait hanging down her back.”
 
“She is an extremely pretty young lady, and a great belle with the young corporals. Mademoiselle Duval has given her a nice little dot of ten thousand francs to her fortune. But, for that reason, the sergeant, who is a level-headed old fellow, is looking around very carefully before he disposes of Denise’s hand.”
 
Toni struck his forehead with his open palm.
 
“Oh!” he cried, “Denise is not for me. I am only a private soldier—I never will be anything else.”
 
“You can be something else if you choose,” said Paul Verney.
 
“And I have been in the circus. The sergeant will never forgive me that.”
 
Paul shook his head dolefully. It was pretty bad, and the sergeant was a great stickler for correctness of behavior. But Paul, being a lover himself, and a poor man, who sincerely loved a rich girl, sympathized with Toni.
 
“Oh, well,” he said, “we must wait and see. One thing is certain—if Mademoiselle Denise takes a notion into her head to like you the sergeant will give in, for he is a very doting father. But, Toni, you must behave yourself after this.”
 
“Indeed I will,” replied Toni. “When I tell you what I have got by bad association, you will understand that I mean what I say.”
 
And then Toni, seating himself at Paul’s command, poured out the story of all that he had suffered at the hands of Nicolas and Pierre, ending up with that last dreadful account of the murder of Delorme.
 
“And that secret, Paul, I am carrying,” cried poor Toni, putting his fists to his eyes, into which the tears started, “and sometimes it’s near to killing me.”
 
Paul listened closely. He realized, quite as fully as Toni did, the position in which Toni had got himself, and did not make light of it.
 
“At all events,” he said, “I don’t think any one regretted Delorme’s death. He was the worst sort of a rascal—a gentleman rascal. You know he was the first husband of Madame Ravenel at Bienville.”
 
Toni nodded.
 
“I have seen many women in the seven years that I have been traveling about the world,” said Toni, “but I never saw one who seemed to radiate modesty and goodness as Madame Ravenel. Do the Ravenels still live at Bienville?”
 
“Yes.” The color came into Paul’s face, which was pink already. “They live there as quietly as ever, but much respected. They are no longer avoided, but still live very quietly.”
 
Toni, looking into Paul’s eyes, saw his face grow redder and redder, and his mouth come wide open, as Toni said, with a sidelong glance and his old-time grin:
 
“And Mademoiselle Lucie?”
 
“Beautiful as a dream,” replied Paul, with a lover’s fondness for superlatives, “and charming beyond words. Only,” here his countenance fell, “she has a great fortune from America, and why should she look at a sublieutenant in a dragoon regiment with two thousand francs a year and his pay?
 
“If I recollect Mademoiselle Lucie aright,” answered Toni, “and she takes a notion into her head to like you, her grandmother will give in, because you used to tell me, in the old days when we sat in the little cranny on the bridge, that Mademoiselle Lucie said her grandmother allowed her to do exactly as she pleased.”
 
Paul laughed at having his own words turned against him.
 
“Oh, Toni!” he cried, “we are a couple of poor devils who love above our stations, both of us.”
 
“Not you,” replied Toni with perfect sincerity. “The greatest lady that ever lived might be proud and glad to marry you.” And as this was said by a person who had known Paul ever since he could walk, in an intimacy closer than that of a brother, it meant something. “I have seen Mademoiselle Lucie,” continued Toni. “I saw her one morning about two months ago, when you and she were riding together. She rides beautifully—I could not teach her anything in that line.”
 
“She does a great many things beautifully, and she is the most generous, warm-hearted creature in the world.”
 
“And just the sort of a young lady to fall in love with a poor sublieutenant and throw herself and her money into his arms.”
 
“But if the poor lieutenant had the feelings of a gentleman he could not accept such a sacrifice. He would run away to escape it.” Paul grew quite gloomy as he said this, and stroked his blond mustache thoughtfully. But it is not natural at twenty-two, with youth and health and a good conscience and abounding spirits, to despair. It was all very difficult, but Paul did not, on that account, cease loving Lucie.
 
“And does she still go to Bienville every year to visit Madame Ravenel?” asked Toni.
 
“Yes, every year, except two years that she spent in America. She is just home now, and very—very—American.”
 
Paul shook his head mournfully as he said this. He had all the prim French ideas, and the dash of American in Lucie frightened him, brave as he was.
 
“But, on her last visit to Bienville, before she went to America, her grandmother sent with her a carriage and a retinue of horses and servants, which quite dazzled Bienville. I think Mademoiselle Lucie bullies her grandmother shamefully. And whom do you think she pays most attention to of all the people in Bienville?”
 
Toni reflected a moment. “Monsieur and Madame Verney?”
 
Paul’s light blue eyes sparkled. “That’s just it. She has my mother with her all the time, and as for my father, he adores her, and Lucie actually pinches his arms and pulls his whiskers when she wants to be impertinent to him. You know she takes advantage of being half American to do the most unconventional things, and my father quite adores her—almost as much so as his son.”
 
“It looks to me,” remarked Toni, “as if Mademoiselle Lucie were taking things in her own hands, and meant to marry you whether you will or not. I have often heard that heiresses run great risks of being married for their money and then finding their husbands very unkind. Perhaps Mademoiselle Lucie knows this and wants to marry a man like yourself, who loves her for herself.”
 
“I think Mademoiselle Lucie has too much sense to marry me,” answered poor Paul quite honestly. “I think it is simply her kindness and generosity that make her kind to me and affectionate to my father and mother. She will marry some great man—a count or a duke perhaps—there are still a few left in France—and not throw herself away on a sublieutenant of dragoons,” and Paul sighed deeply.
 
The pair spent nearly two hours together. It seemed to Toni as if he could never be satiated with looking at his old friend, as pink and white and blond as ever. Paul felt the same toward Toni, and when, in the old way, Toni took Jacques out of his pocket and showed him, it was as if seven years passed away into mist and they were boys together. But at last Paul was obliged to dismiss Toni, who went back to his quarters with a heart lighter than it had been for seven years.
 
And he was to see more of Paul than he had dared to hope, for Paul had promised to arrange that Toni should be his soldier servant. The present incumbent was not exactly to Paul’s liking and he was only too glad to replace him with Toni.
 
There was work waiting for him, and that, too, under Sergeant Duval’s eye, and Toni did it with the energy of a man who is determined on pleasing the father of his beloved. No one would have recognized, in this smart, active, natty trooper, the dirty idle Toni of his boyhood. Sergeant Duval, [Pg 171]however, was a skeptic by nature, and he waited to see more of Toni before reversing the notion he had formed of that young man. He had heard something, on his annual visits to Bienville, of Toni’s fondness for Denise, and, when she was in short frocks and pinafores, had sometimes joked her about it, but Denise, who blushed at the least little thing, would hide her head on her father’s shoulder and almost weep at the idea that she had even glanced at a boy.
 
Toni was longing to ask after Denise, but he dared not. As soon as he had a moment’s time to himself—and a recruit lately joined has not much leisure—he wrote a long letter to his mother. He did not write very well, and was a reckless speller, but that letter carried untold happiness and relief with it to the Widow Marcel at Bienville. His duties as Paul’s servant began at once. Toni was not overindustrious, but if he had to work for any one he would wish to work for Paul.
 
And then came a radiant time with Toni—a time when life seemed to him all fair. He managed to put that secret horror of Nicolas and Pierre out of his mind as they were out of his sight. He got his mother’s forgiveness by return of post, and he laid aside all the fear he had had of Nicolas and Pierre, and enjoyed the sight and the occasional society of the two beings who, with his mother, were nearest to him of the world—Paul Verney and Denise. He dared not mention Denise’s name to Sergeant Duval, who preserved the most unfeeling reticence about her toward Toni. The sergeant had no mind to encourage the attentions of young recruits, just out of the circus, to his pretty daughter with her splendid dot of ten thousand francs.
 
Toni, however, knew that the time of his service would come to an end in a year, and then he would be able to carry out that beautiful scheme that had haunted him during his circus life. He would become an instructor in a riding-school and earn big wages, as much as two hundred and fifty francs the month, and meanwhile he would lead so correct a life that even Sergeant Duval would be forced to approve of him. All these resolutions were very much increased by the first sight he caught of Denise. It was about a fortnight after he joined, and during that time he had kept his eyes open for the lady of his love. Although Sergeant Duval had quarters at the barracks, Denise and Mademoiselle Duval lived in lodgings in the town, and Toni did not have many opportunities of going into the town. One Sunday evening, however, a beautiful August Sunday, Toni found himself standing in the public square where the band played merrily and one of those open air balls, which are so French and so charming, was going on. Ranged on benches around were the older women, and among them Toni at once recognized the tall, angular, black figure of Mademoiselle Duval; and whirling around in the arms of a handsome dragoon with a beautiful pair of black mustaches, much finer than Toni’s, was Denise. Toni’s heart jumped into his mouth, his soul leaped into his eyes. It was Denise, of the acacia tree, and the buns, of long ago.
 
She was as blond, as modest, as neat as ever, but far prettier. Her fair hair was twisted up on her shapely head, on which sat a coquettish white hat. She wore a white muslin gown, with the short, full skirt much beruffled. Denise would have liked a train, but Mademoiselle Duval frowned sternly on such unbecoming frivolities as trained gowns for a sergeant’s daughter.
 
Denise had developed into as much of a coquette as Lucie Bernard had been, only in a different direction. Lucie achieved her conquests by a charming boldness, a bewitching unconventionality. Denise Duval succeeded in attracting the attention of the other sex by a demureness and quaint propriety which were immensely effective in their way.
 
Toni, having some instinctive knowledge of this, determined to proceed with great caution and military prudence. He would strive to carry the fortress of Denise’s affections by gradual approaches and not by assault. So, in pursuance of this plan, he walked up to Mademoiselle Duval and making a low bow said:
 
“Mademoiselle Duval, may I recall myself to your memory? I am Toni Marcel, the son of Madame Marcel, of Bienville, and had the honor of knowing you when I was a boy.”
 
Mademoiselle Duval gave him one grim look, and then cried out:
 
“Oh, I know you very well, Toni. You were the worst boy in Bienville, and as dirty as you were bad. Oh, how much trouble did you give your mother!”
 
This was not a very auspicious beginning for a young man who wished to become the nephew-in-law of the lady he addressed, but Toni was not deficient in the sort of courage which could take [Pg 175]him through an emergency like that. He only said hypocritically, and with another bow and a sigh of penitence:
 
“Ah, Mademoiselle, every word that you say is true. I know I was very naughty and very idle, and my mother was far too patient with me. I gave her a great deal of trouble, but I hope to be a comfort to her in the future. I had a letter from her only yesterday in which, like the rest of your sex, Mademoiselle, she showed a beautiful spirit of forgiveness. I hope that she will come to visit me for a few days before long.”
 
Mademoiselle Duval was not greatly softened by this speech, but seeing Toni disposed to take a scolding meekly, she invited him to sit down by her side, when she harangued him on all his iniquities for the last seven years. The sergeant had told her that Toni had been in the circus and that was enough. Mademoiselle Duval warned Toni that all circus people were foredoomed to hell-fire, and that he would probably lead the procession. Toni took the attack on himself very meekly, but said:
 
“I assure you Mademoiselle, there were some good people in the circus—some good women, even.”
 
 
“Good women, did you say?” screamed Mademoiselle Duval, “wearing tights and spangles, and turning somersaults!”
 
Toni bethought him of the time when there was an outbreak of scarlet fever in the circus company and how these same painted ladies in tights and spangles stood by one another and nursed each other and each other’s children day and night, and uttered no word of complaint or reproach. He knew more than Mademoiselle Duval on the subject of the goodness and the wickedness which dwell in the hearts of men. He told Mademoiselle Duval, however, the story of the outbreak of scarlet fever. He had a natural eloquence which stood him in good stead, and Mademoiselle Duval, who was one of the best women in the world and had a soft heart, although a sharp tongue, was almost brought to tears by Toni’s story.
 
Just then Denise’s cavalier brought her back to her aunt, and Toni, jumping up, profoundly saluted Denise. His soul rushed into his eyes, those handsome, daredevil black eyes which the prim and proper Denise had secretly admired from her babyhood. She glanced back at him as she courtesied to him with great propriety, and something in her face made Toni’s pulses bound with joy. There was a softness, almost a tenderness, in her look which Toni, having some knowledge of the world, interpreted to his own advantage. Denise’s own heart was palpitating, not tumultuously like Toni’s, but with a gentle quickness which was new to her.
 
“Ah, Mademoiselle,” said Toni, calling Denise Mademoiselle for the first time, “how well I remember you in my happy days at Bienville, when you used to give me buns under the acacia tree.”
 
He stopped. A soft blush came into Denise’s fair cheeks. She smiled and looked at him and then away from him. Denise remembered the bench under the acacia tree and all that had happened there well enough. Denise knew then, and knew now, that when the Toni of those days gave up something to eat to a small girl, his feelings were very deeply engaged to her. She recollected in particular the first afternoon the Ravenels took tea with the Verneys that Toni had selected one beautiful, ripe plum, and after eying it longingly, had put his arm around her neck and put the plum in her mouth, and what he had said then. Her blushing now revealed it all to Toni.
 
Suddenly the band struck up a waltz, Toni politely asked Denise to favor him with her hand for the dance, and they went off together. The moon smiled softly at them, and even the electric lights had a kind of tenderness in their glare, when Toni, clasping Denise in his arms for the first time, began to whirl around with her to the rhythm of the music. He felt himself raised above the earth—all his fears, all his evil-doing had departed from him—he felt, poor Toni, as if he would never be afraid of Nicolas and Pierre again, and as if that waltz was a foretaste of Heaven for him.
 
And Denise, too, was happy. He saw it in her shy eyes, in the softness of her smile, and presently Toni drew her closer to him and whispered:
 
“Denise, Denise, do you remember?” and Denise whispered back, “Yes, Toni, I remember all.”
 
And so as it was with Paul Verney and Lucie Bernard, they called each other by their first names when they were alone.
 
Presently in the mazes of the dance Toni looked up and there was Paul Verney passing through the square. He caught Toni’s eye and Toni grinned back at him rapturously. When the music stopped, Toni, putting Denise’s hand within his arm, escorted her back to the bench where Mademoiselle Duval [Pg 179]sat knitting in the electric light. He contrived to pass directly in front of Paul Verney, whom he saluted respectfully, and Paul bowed low to Denise and said to her:
 
“Mademoiselle, we are both natives of Bienville, and I am most happy to see you here with your worthy aunt and your respected father,” and then Paul, with an eye single to Toni’s interests, walked on the other side of Denise up to where Mademoiselle Duval sat and promptly claimed acquaintance with her. In the old days at Bienville there had not been such a tremendous difference between Paul Verney, the poor advocate’s son, and the children of the pastry shop and the confectioner. Now Paul was an officer, but he was very pleasant and gentlemanlike, however, though quite dignified, and gave himself no haughty airs. He inquired with the deepest solicitude after Mademoiselle Duval’s health, remembered gratefully sundry tarts and cakes she had given him in the old days, and then said to her, in the most unblushing manner:
 
“And, Mademoiselle, we have here another citizen of Bienville, Marcel”—it was the first time that Paul had ever called Toni, Marcel, in his life—“who, I assure you, is worthy of our old town. He is strictly attentive to his duties, and the best rider in my troop. I predict that he will be a corporal before his enlistment is out.”
 
And thus having advanced Toni’s cause with his prospective aunt-in-law, Paul Verney withdrew, winking surreptitiously at Toni as he went off. It was impossible that Mademoiselle Duval should not revise her opinion of Toni after this testimony from his officer, so Toni at once found himself in a most acceptable position with Mademoiselle Duval. He danced twice more with Denise, carrying her off in the face of a couple of corporals, and, by his devoted attentions and insidious flattery of Mademoiselle Duval, gained that lady’s good-will. He would have liked to escort his old friends back to their lodging, but, as he explained, he barely had time to reach the barracks before the tap of the drum, and he scurried off, the happiest trooper in Beaupré that night.
 
When he neared the quadrangle on which the barracks faced, he overtook Paul Verney, and as he rushed past he whispered in his ear:
 
“Thank you, thank you, dear Paul.”
 
In that moment he could have not refrained, to save his life, from calling his lieutenant Paul.
CHAPTER XIII
 It was a bond of sympathy between Paul and Toni that each should, as it were, love above his station. Paul was a frequent visitor at the Château Bernard, and was regarded by the stately and imposing Madame Bernard with very mixed feelings. The old lady looked on Lucie very much as a hen does which has hatched out a duckling among her brood. Madame Bernard was a representative of the strictness of manners, such as had prevailed in France fifty years before.
 
Although dragon-like in her manner, Madame Bernard was at heart a grandmother, and that tells the tale. Lucie was her idol, and the two years the young girl had spent with her mother’s family in America had been one long nightmare to Madame Bernard. When she returned she was the same Lucie, with an added dash of Americanism which frightened Madame Bernard almost out of her wits. Nevertheless there was something about this wild young creature, this half American, something which gave Madame Bernard instinctive confidence that she could never commit the fearful error of Sophie Ravenel.
 
Madame Bernard was now more than seventy years of age, and quite unequal to opposing Lucie’s will, and Lucie, at twenty years of age, reigned over the Château Bernard in a manner that terrified and enchanted all under her sway. She had, somewhere in her beautiful head, a nugget of American common sense—a thing which none of those around her quite understood, only they saw that Mademoiselle Lucie never came to grief in any of her pranks and schemes. She was, of course, surrounded by admirers. Madame Bernard had been considering offers of marriage for her ever since her eighteenth year, and had nearly arranged one or two for her of the most advantageous description, but what should this madcap Lucie do but laugh at every one of these desirable lovers, declaring that she did not mean to marry until she was quite ready, and might not marry at all. This latter grotesque idea mortified Madame Bernard, who had already promised no less than six ambitious mamas that in a year or two she was sure that Lucie would come to her senses. Then Lucie was given to joking, a practice which Madame Bernard had never heard of any girl indulging, and actually made fun of the excellent partis which Madame Bernard offered for her consideration, drew caricatures of them, wrote nonsense verses about them, and otherwise amused herself at their expense.
 
Madame Bernard observed that the sandy-haired young sublieutenant, Paul Verney, cool, calm, and matter-of-fact, seemed to have a singular influence, and that for good, over Lucie.
 
Their meeting had come about in the most natural way possible. On Lucie’s return from America she had gone to Bienville to pay Madame Ravenel that longed for visit. Her coming upset the whole town, and was of itself a cyclone. With the rash generosity of youth Lucie, who now understood Sophie’s sad history, took on herself the task of placing the Ravenels upon the footing which she thought they deserved. This meant bringing, as she had promised to do in her childish days long ago, a retinue of horses and carriages and servants with her, likewise of dazzling gowns and ravishing hats, and making her visit one long fête. The Ravenels, wiser than little Lucie, tried to curb her, but as well try to curb a wandering zephyr as [Pg 184]Lucie Bernard, with a noble and generous impulse in her heart. The people of Bienville were a kindly set on whom the self-respecting seclusion of the Ravenels had not been without its impress. When ambitious mamas and impressionable young officers found that the only way to make any terms with this child of brilliant destiny was to accept those she loved at the value she placed on them, it was not so difficult to accomplish. The Ravenels, in that fortnight of Lucie’s visit, got more invitations than they had received in all the years they had lived in Bienville.
 
Among the first was to drink tea in the Verneys’ garden—a modest form of entertainment suited to the advocate’s means. It happened to be Madame Verney’s fête-day, a day which Paul always spent with his mother, if possible. Madame Verney had not only written, but telegraphed, for Paul to get leave if he possibly could. It was a long distance to travel to spend twenty-four hours with his mother, and Paul’s two thousand francs’ allowance, besides his pay, had a habit of walking off mysteriously, just like the allowances of other young officers, but one line at the end of Madame Verney’s letter settled the matter for Sublieutenant Paul Verney. The line ran thus—“Mademoiselle Lucie Bernard will be staying with the Ravenels—her first visit since her return from America—and the Ravenels are coming to tea with us on my fête-day.” Paul went that moment and asked boldly for a week’s leave.
 
He got to Bienville at noon on the great day, and at five o’clock, when the little festivity was inaugurated in the garden and the Ravenels entered, there was Paul, still pink and white and sandy-haired, not spoiled with beauty, but adorned with manliness. With the new affectation of the young French officers he adopted the modern fashion of discarding his uniform on every possible occasion and wearing citizens’ clothes whenever he could, but on this day he could not but remember what Lucie had said, a long time ago, about his wearing a uniform next time they should meet. So he put on his handsome new undress uniform and looked a soldier. His mother admired him immensely, so did his father, and so, in fact, did Lucie, when that young lady, in a dazzling white costume and charming white hat and white shoes, came tripping along the garden path. Paul blushed from his head to his heels as he made her a beautiful [Pg 186]bow, but Lucie, who had acquired the startling American fashion of shaking hands with any and everybody, deliberately slipped her little hand in his and gave him a look from under her long eyelashes which said as plainly as words—“Welcome, Paul.” And by Madame Verney’s tea-table in the little garden their hearts were cemented without one word being spoken between them.
 
After that Paul was with Lucie every moment he could contrive while he was in Bienville, cursing himself meanwhile for being a villain in forcing his company on that radiant creature with her millions of francs. He had, however, the best excuse in the world—he could not help it. And when he found that he would shortly be sent to Beaupré, in the immediate neighborhood of the Château Bernard, he was the happiest and likewise the most miserable creature alive. Lucie was unblushingly happy and demanded that as soon as he arrived at Beaupré he should present himself at the château and pay his respects to Madame Bernard. Of course, he did it, wicked as he knew it to be, with the result that he was the only man whom Lucie really encouraged. And in a little while, as natures quickly adjust themselves to each other, Paul acquired a species of control over Lucie, a thing which no one but Sophie Ravenel had ever done before.
 
She generally wished to do what was right, but on the occasions when she wished to do what was wrong, Madame Bernard saw that the sandy-haired young sublieutenant could turn Lucie from her way. In particular, he could dissuade her from doing many rash things, sometimes innocent, sometimes dangerous. She was an accomplished, though reckless rider and when she would have ridden a horse which, rightly named Comet, had run away once, and might be depended on to do so again, Paul Verney had managed to do more with her by a few words than all of Madame Bernard’s prayers and the exhortations of the head groom.
 
Paul often came over to the Château Bernard and, on one special afternoon he found Comet saddled and waiting, and when he went into the drawing-room, Madame Bernard implored him to try to persuade Lucie not to ride Comet. Presently Lucie tripped in, looking charming in her riding-habit, and with the light of contradiction in her eyes. Paul, she knew, objected to her riding the horse, and she was prepared to defy him.
 
“I think, Mademoiselle,” said Paul quietly, “it would scarcely be judicious for you to ride Comet.”
 
Lucie, who was proud of her horsemanship, resented this promptly, and replied:
 
“But I wish to ride Comet. I am perfectly capable of managing him, and besides, he is not really vicious.”
 
“The last may be true, Mademoiselle, but I think you are mistaken in the former. You have no more real control over Comet than a butterfly has.”
 
For answer, Lucie tapped her whip smartly on the mantelpiece, and said:
 
“Thank you very much, Monsieur Verney—I must beg you to excuse me—good afternoon,” and was going out of the room when Paul, who had walked over from his quarters, asked of Madame Bernard:
 
“Madame, may I have one of your horses saddled, and follow Mademoiselle Lucie on her dangerous ride?”
 
“Indeed, you may,” replied poor Madame Bernard, wringing her hands, “take anything you may find in the stables.”
 
Lucie burst out laughing. “And do you mean to ride in that dress?” she asked of Paul, who had on a frock coat and held a silk hat in his hand.
 
 
“It isn’t the dress that I would choose to ride in, Mademoiselle,” answered Paul, laughing. “I dare say I shall look quite ridiculous in this costume scampering after you—everybody we meet will surmise the reason—nevertheless, I shall go.”
 
“But you will not,” cried Lucie, running out of doors to where the horses were standing. She was not equal to the impertinence of having her groom assist her on horseback with an officer and a gentleman standing by, and, furthermore, the groom understood the situation and kept discreetly in the background. Paul further astounded her by directing the groom to ride to the stables and have a horse saddled for him and brought at once. Lucie was so angry that she had to wink her dark, bright eyes to keep the tears from coming, but Paul was as cool and as calm as possible.
 
“Never mind, Monsieur,” said Lucie, in a trembling voice, “I shall ride Comet—of that you may be sure. You may force yourself on me to-day, but you can not do it every day, and I shall ride what horse I please.”
 
Paul, urged by his love and tenderness for her, said words for which he thought he would have died rather than have spoken:
 
 
“Dear Lucie, if you are as reckless as that you will break my heart. Forgive me for calling you by your name, but don’t you remember, seven years ago, in the park at Bienville, you told me that when we were grown up we should call each other Paul and Lucie in private?”
 
Paul stopped. He felt as if he were guilty of a crime in saying these words to that enchanting creature, who would marry so far above him in every way. All at once he saw a vision of his father’s modest house at Bienville, and thought of his own small allowance and slender pay, and reckoned himself the greatest fool in existence. But Lucie’s reply to this was to look at him with a mysterious smile on her expressive face, and to say softly:
 
“This is the first time that you have ever called me by name, Paul—”
 
They were standing on the lawn, in full view of dozens of eyes, while this was passing. Paul looked at her in dumb admiration and despair, but there was nothing in the least despairing in the smile which presently rippled over Lucie’s face, with her eyes all fire and dew. The fact is that Mademoiselle Lucie had been very much in love with Sublieutenant Paul Verney, ever since they had been children together in the park at Bienville, and wished him to know it, and she was in love with the best part of him—his courage, his modesty, his good sense, his clean and upright life, and having the American archness in her nature, she saw the humorous side of it and could not forbear laughing at poor Paul.
 
“But I think,” she said, “a gentleman should keep his word. You promised me that you would call me by my first name in private, and you have only done it once, and now you speak as if you would never do it again.”
 
Paul secretly thought Lucie, just as he had always done, a very improper little person, but quite irresistible.
 
“At all events,” said Lucie airily, flicking the blossoms of a tall, blue hydrangea nodding gravely in the sun, “I intend to call you Paul, in private that is—and I don’t think I shall go to ride this afternoon.”
 
“And promise me,” said Paul, coming a little closer and looking at her earnestly, “that you won’t ride Comet any more—Lucie.”
 
“I promise then, Paul,” replied Lucie, with an affectation of a meekness which was far removed from her, and which she only used for purposes of her own. Then the horses were sent away, and the two walked together across the lawn and into the drawing-room where Madame Bernard sat in an agony.
 
“I shall not ride this afternoon, Grandmama,” said Lucie. “Monsieur Paul would insist on going with me, and he would look so utterly ridiculous on horseback dressed as he is that I was ashamed to be seen with him; so, instead, he will stay and have tea with us, and meanwhile we shall go and play billiards.”
 
This charmed Madame Bernard, who concluded that the next time Lucie was refractory she would send post-haste for Sublieutenant Verney to manage her. It is not to be supposed that Madame Bernard did not see the possibilities of the future as well as Madame Verney had done long years before, when Paul and Lucie had played together as children. But Madame Bernard, like many other women who know much of the world, was beginning dimly to reach a just estimate of things. After having seen many marriages and a considerable number of divorces she had realized that it was the man, and not the title or the estate, with which a woman must reckon. And Paul was so very attentive to Madame Bernard, picking up her ball of worsted when she was knitting, and giving her his advice, when asked, regarding the colors of her embroidery, that she had begun to wish Paul Verney had at least a family tree if not a title. Money she was not so particular about, as Lucie had plenty of that. But he was only a sublieutenant and his father was an advocate in a small way in a provincial town. Madame Bernard groaned when she thought of these last things.
 
When billiards was proposed, the old lady made no objection whatever, but followed the two young people into the large, cool billiard room with its parquet floor and ground glass ceiling, and embroidered industriously while the two played a merry game and Lucie beat Paul two points to one. She could beat him at billiards, at tennis, and at cards; she sang and played much better than he, and rode quite as well; and she delighted in showing her skill over him; but, having a great deal of sense in her pretty head, she realized that in all considerable things Paul stood near the top. He took his defeats so pleasantly, for he was the most modest fellow alive, that Lucie often declared there was no pleasure in beating him.
 
This particular afternoon Lucie beat him most shamefully, but Paul had his reward in the enjoyment of her exquisite grace in playing the most graceful game in the world. Madame Bernard, apparently absorbed in her embroidery, was watching every tone and motion and saw that they were playing another game far more interesting and with much greater stakes than any game of billiards. And, as she had a presentiment that Lucie would have her own way in the matter of a husband, Madame Bernard, with calm resignation, was quite reconciled to Paul, and was glad in the present instance it was no worse. They played through the whole afternoon, and Madame Bernard asked Paul to stay to dinner, but this he was obliged to decline, much to his vexation. A sublieutenant of dragoons is not master of his own time, so Paul went away reluctantly, and was followed by the vision of a charming figure, showing the most beautiful hand and arm in the world, and dealing the most deadly shots to her antagonist.
 
When dinner was over, Lucie came and sat by Madame Bernard in her own small drawing-room [Pg 195]as the old lady stitched at her embroidery under the evening lamp.
 
“Grandmama,” she said quietly, after a long pause, “what do you think of Paul Verney?”
 
“A most estimable young man,” replied Madame Bernard.
 
“His family are not at all rich or distinguished,” said Lucie, “but they are very dear. I wish you could see his father, so kind, so pleasant, so gallant toward Madame Verney, and like an older brother to Paul. And Madame Verney is sweet—I love to see them together, Paul and his father and mother. And then they are so kind to poor Sophie and Captain Ravenel.”
 
Whenever Sophie Ravenel’s name was mentioned, it was like a knife to Madame Bernard’s proud, weak, sensitive heart. It was not only that Sophie’s conduct had been sinful, but, what was worse, it was such bad form. Lucie meditated a while, and then added:
 
“And Paul is a poor man even for a sublieutenant, and he will not have an easy time of it. He has no family influence or powerful friends to push him forward, and he will only get on by his own merits. But that always tells in the long run. When Paul is forty, all his superiors will know what a fine man and what a fine officer he is. He will be given things for the asking, that other men strive and struggle for. And he is not at all handsome, though he looks well in uniform, and on horseback.”
 
Then a silence fell in the drawing-room. There was not a sound, except the ticking of the gilt clock. Lucie was sitting by the table, her elbows upon it, her rounded chin in her hands.
 
“My dear,” said Madame Bernard, “why do you call Monsieur Verney by his first name?”
 
“Because,” said Lucie, quite calmly, taking Madame Bernard’s embroidery out of her hands, and looking her full in the face, “because I love him.”
CHAPTER XIV
 Those pleasant days of late summer and early autumn were a halcyon time to Paul and Lucie, and to Toni and Denise. Toni was troubled with no qualms, whatever, with regard to Denise’s superiority to him, and the fact that she might justly aspire to something far beyond a private soldier. He was the Toni of old, and, like the great Napoleon, he reckoned that if he wanted a thing, it was his already; and, instead of shrinking from the idea of Denise’s impressive fortune of ten thousand francs, he was glad she had so much, and wished that it was more—not that he meant to squander it or that he loved Denise for it. He would have loved her just as well without a franc. Nor did he love her any better for having it, but he did not consider that the ten thousand francs placed any barrier between Denise and himself. And then from the first moment their eyes had met on the night of the ball in the public square, that old, sweet feeling of being cared for and protected by Denise had stolen into his heart. Toni wanted a wife to protect him from other people and from himself—that was the long and short of it. As for Denise, her nature had shaped itself to the idea of looking after Toni and she wanted to give him all the buns and good things in life. With Paul and Lucie this was exactly reversed. Lucie felt the most charming sense of protection in Paul’s strong arm and strong sense.
 
Toni courted Denise assiduously, and did the same by Mademoiselle Duval and the sergeant, and succeeded, in the course of time, in winning a grudging respect from the sergeant. That stern warrior knew too much about Toni’s boyhood to accept him at his own value, but his perfect knowledge of the voltige was an irresistible recommendation to the sergeant, and moreover, there was no denying that Toni was a good soldier, attentive to his duty. He had not once been punished since he had joined; and this was a remarkable record even for the best of soldiers. Then Toni stood well with his sublieutenant. This counted for something with the sergeant; nevertheless, he remembered how, in the old days at Bienville, Toni’s black shock and Paul Verney’s blond head were often close together, and these youthful friendships have a strong hold on many men. Still, Paul Verney was not the man to overlook the sins of a conscript, and the sergeant was forced to admit that no fault could be found with Toni so far.
 
He had begun by suspecting Toni’s intentions toward Denise, but his suspicions had been completely lulled to sleep, chiefly by Denise herself. This young person, who rarely raised her eyes from the ground and might have posed for a statue of Simplicity, knew perfectly well how to throw dust in the sergeant’s eyes. Concerning Toni, she never allowed him to be mentioned without some disparaging remark, such as, “That ridiculous Toni,” or “That absurd creature.” She called attention to the fact, which everybody knew, that Toni’s nose was a snub. She also observed, what nobody else had, that Toni slouched when he walked and was very ugly. Toni, in truth, was the most graceful fellow in the regiment, and handsome in his black-eyed, black-browed way. Denise would scarcely admit that Toni knew how to ride, but even this did not put the sergeant on his guard. She openly complained that Toni did not know how to dance and waltzed all over her feet when he danced with her in the evenings in the public square. When in her father’s presence, and Toni was there, Denise treated him like a dog. He was the only person living to whom she had ever shown any active hostility, but the mild, the gentle Denise would take him up on the smallest provocation, yawned at his jokes, laughed when he told of his discomforts and contradicted most of his assertions.
 
Mademoiselle Duval, who had become a great friend of Toni’s, lectured Denise on this, and even the sergeant told her that he thought she was rather hard on poor Toni. At this Denise shrugged her shoulders.
 
“He’s such a bore,” she said. “I always recollect him as a dirty, greedy little boy at Bienville. I believe he is just the same.”
 
Now, Toni certainly showed neither of those traits at present, but Denise would not allow a word to be said in his favor. Toni, however, strange to say, did not appear to be discomposed by this conduct of Denise’s, but joined the Duval party two or three times a week when they sat, on the pleasant evenings, in the public square listening to the music; and invariably asked Denise to dance with him. He even had the assurance, when it grew cool in the autumn evenings, to come to their lodgings, and it was here that Denise’s neglect of him inspired the sergeant to remonstrate with her.
 
Toni had the superlative impudence even to bring an occasional bag of roasted chestnuts or some little cakes to Denise, for Toni was a connoisseur in cakes, but she invariably declared that they were very bad of their kind. This same Denise, when she and Toni danced together, would whisper in his ear, “Be sure and ask me to dance at least twice more,” or, tripping along the street, would meet him and, lifting her pretty eyes to him, would say, “Toni, when are you coming to see us again?”—but such is the nature of woman.
 
Early in September Madame Marcel arranged to come to pay Toni a visit, as Toni could not go to see her, and Toni engaged a lodging for her in the same house where Mademoiselle Duval and Denise lodged.
 
“What do you think, aunt?” cried Denise, on learning this from the landlady, “that impudent Toni has dared to engage a room for his mother on the same floor with us.”
 
The sergeant happened to be present. He had grateful recollections of Madame Marcel, the neat[Pg 202]ness of her shop and the thriving trade she had, as well as that lady’s personal charms.
 
“Denise,” said he, “you gibe at Toni entirely too much, and as for his mother, a most estimable woman is Madame Marcel, and an old friend and neighbor, and I desire that you treat her with politeness.”
 
“Certainly I shall, papa,” replied Denise, “but as for that odious Toni, you know I can’t stand him.”
 
“You will have to stand him,” replied the sergeant tartly. “He is a good soldier and seems to have reformed completely, and you must show him some respect while his mother is here at least. Do you understand me, Denise?”
 
Denise understood him perfectly, only the sergeant did not in the least understand Denise.
 
It was on an early autumn afternoon that Toni met his mother in the third-class waiting-room at the station. When he took her in his arms he felt himself a little boy again. Madame Marcel was not much changed, except that her hair, of a satin blackness like Toni’s when he had last seen her, was now amply streaked with gray.
 
“Mama, Mama!” cried Toni, kissing her, while the big tears ran down his cheeks, “your hair is gray and it is I who have done it.”
 
“No, no, Toni,” cried Madame Marcel, who was kissing him all over his face, and, who, like most mothers, was unwilling to admit that the prodigal had been at fault, “your mother is growing old, my son; that is it.”
 
She was still handsome, though, and very well dressed in her black bonnet and silk mantle, and looked quite the lady. Toni felt proud of her as he escorted her through the street, carrying her bags and parcels on his arm; and Madame Marcel felt proud of her handsome young soldier with his trim uniform, for Toni, under the guidance and recommendation of his corporal, had developed into a model of soldierly smartness in dress. Toni showed his mother up stairs into the neat room he had engaged for her, and Madame Marcel stowed away the provisions she had brought for herself and Toni, being a thoughtful soul. Then Toni sat in his mother’s lap, as he had done when he was a little boy, and told her everything that had happened to him, except about Nicolas and Pierre. He was trying to oust those two villains from his mind and to shut the door on that terrible secret that he shared with them. He told his mother about Denise and Mademoiselle Duval; and Madame Marcel, knowing Denise to be the most correct of young girls, with ten thousand francs as her fortune, rejoiced that Toni had fallen in love with her, for it was clearly impossible that Denise, or any other girl, could resist her Toni, now that he was clean and was doing his duty.
 
After a while, a tap came at the door, and when Toni opened it, there stood the sergeant, got up as if he were on dress parade under the eye of the general himself, his mustaches beautifully waxed, not only waxed but flagrantly dyed a shining black. He greeted Madame Marcel with effusion, and then said:
 
“I came to request that Madame Marcel will have supper with us to-night. She has not yet made her arrangements, perhaps, and my sister and my daughter will be most pleased. I am sorry, Toni, that I can not ask you, but you are due at the barracks.”
 
It struck Toni that this was a scheme for getting him out of the way. He saw something in the sergeant’s eye which indicated a very deep interest in Madame Marcel, and then recollection came surging over Toni of the proposition which the sergeant had made some few years before, to marry Madame Marcel for the purpose of thrashing the little boy who hid trembling under the counter. Toni was too big to thrash now, but the sergeant always appeared to him to be about nine feet high. Toni did not approve of the match in the concrete, but in the abstract, as the sergeant’s advances to Madame Marcel might result to the advantage of Toni and Denise, Toni determined to encourage him. He felt sure that his mother, like most mothers, was more in love with him than with any other man, and would hardly dare jilt him for the finest sergeant in the French army. So Toni, on his way to the barracks, turned over things in his mind, and determined to forward the sergeant’s suit up to a certain point.
 
Things turned out very much as Toni had anticipated. The sergeant had reached that time of life when he began to look forward to his retirement. He had saved up something and, by his sister’s thrift and generosity, Denise was provided for, but the idea of Madame Marcel’s large, warm, cheerful kitchen in winter, and shady garden in summer would be extremely attractive to a retired sergeant on half-pay. And Madame Marcel was extremely comely, there was no doubt about that, and not given to scolding like Mademoiselle Duval.
 
As for Madame Marcel, she saw through the sergeant in forty-eight hours, and what she did not see Toni enlightened her upon.
 
“Mama,” said he, some days after, when the two were in the privacy of Madame Marcel’s room, “I think Sergeant Duval wants to marry you.”
 
For answer, Madame Marcel blushed up to her eyes and replied:
 
“For shame, Toni. I have no idea of marrying again.”
 
“I didn’t say you had,” replied the wily Toni. “I said the sergeant wants to marry you, or, rather, I think he wants to marry the shop. But he doesn’t want to marry me—I am too big to thrash. But, Mama,” he continued, coming up to her and putting his arm around her waist, a species of love-making which mothers adore, “you mustn’t throw the sergeant down too hard; at least, not for the present; because I—I”—here Toni blushed more than his mother and grinned bashfully, “because I want to marry Denise. I never told you this before.”
 
 
“There was no need to, Toni,” replied his mother, laughing, “I have seen it ever since you were ten years old, and I think Denise wants to marry you.”
 
At this Toni’s black eyes danced.
 
“I think so, too,” he said, with his own inimitable naïvete. “For all she is so bashful she has told me so a great many times, with her eyes, that is.”
 
“And it would be an excellent match for you, Toni,” replied his mother. “Denise is so orderly, so neat, and such a good manager, and after you have served your term and come back to Bienville, I will take you and Denise with me into the shop.”
 
“I can do better than that,” cried Toni. “I can be instructor in a riding-school and get three hundred francs the month, and then you can sell the shop and come and live with Denise and me.”
 
Madame Marcel was too sensible a woman to accept this arrangement beforehand, but replied prudently:
 
“Very well, if you can make three hundred francs the month, you and Denise can go and live in Paris and I will visit you twice a year, it would hardly be safe for me to give up the shop.”
 
“But we should be afraid to leave you there,” said Toni roguishly, chucking his mother under the chin, “with the sergeant just across the way, for he will be retired just as my time is up. You and he might elope some fine day, and then come and fall down on your knees and humbly beg my pardon.”
 
“I certainly shall if I elope,” replied Madame Marcel, smiling.
 
“The sergeant is hard hit,” continued Toni. “Let me see, you had supper with them the evening you came—that was Thursday. Then, the next morning the sergeant sent you in a melon for your breakfast, and in the afternoon, when you were sitting in the public square, he joined you. I saw him sitting on the bench beside you, but he sneaked off as soon as he saw me coming—that was Friday. Then Friday evening he put Denise up to asking you to take a walk, and you fell in with him, so Denise tells me, and he walked home with you. And to-day—”
 
Just then, a tap came at the door, and the sergeant, with his beautifully waxed and dyed mustaches appeared. He carried in his hand a large nosegay, and without seeing Toni, bowed low to Madame Marcel and said:
 
 
“Madame, will you honor me by accepting this little offering?”
 
Madame Marcel advanced, smiling, and accepted the nosegay shyly. Toni, meanwhile, had slipped behind a screen which concealed the stove.
 
“How very charming you are looking to-day, Madame. No one would dream that you had a son as old as Toni. You should represent him as your younger brother,” said the sergeant gallantly and quite unaware of Toni behind the screen.
 
For all Madame Marcel declared she never meant to marry again, nevertheless, she was a woman, and the sergeant’s compliments tickled her agreeably, so she smiled coyly at this and declared she looked a hundred.
 
“Nonsense,” cried the sergeant, “you don’t look more than twenty-five. And, by the way, Madame, my sister and my daughter are making up a party for to-morrow—I am off duty for the whole afternoon—and we should be very much pleased if you would join us in a little excursion by the tramway to a very pleasant place about two miles from here, in the country. There is an inn with a garden, and we can take our luncheon with us and order the wine from the inn. We shall start at five o’clock, and we shall hope to have the pleasure of your charming company.”
 
That was too much for Toni. He suddenly emerged from behind the screen and said, grasping the sergeant’s hand with effusion:
 
“Thank you, thank you, Sergeant, so much. We will accept with pleasure. I think I can get off, too, by applying to Lieutenant Verney.”
 
The sergeant scowled at Toni. Here was a pretty kettle of fish. He had no notion of having him with their party, but there was now no help for it. The prospect was charming for Toni. The sergeant, he felt sure, would devote himself to Madame Marcel, and then Toni and Denise would be left to themselves—only, what was to become of Mademoiselle Duval? Toni knew the Golden Lion well, also its garden, and orchard, and it was full of little sequestered places where he might have a quiet word with Denise except for Mademoiselle Duval. But Toni was a strategist of no mean order, and if he once got Denise in the garden of the Golden Lion he thought he could see her for a few minutes alone. So the party was made up for the next day if the weather should permit. Toni, too, could get off after parade, which was at four o’clock, and everything seemed most auspicious, except concerning Mademoiselle Duval.
 
As Toni walked his beat that night, for he was doing sentry duty, he began to turn over in his mind various plans by which he could get rid of his prospective aunt-in-law, and suddenly a brilliant idea came to him. He knew Mademoiselle Duval was mortally afraid of snakes. It is true it was hardly the season for snakes, being the middle of September, but this would make no difference to Mademoiselle Duval, who shuddered even in January at the thought of a snake. Toni, therefore, laid his plans, and the next morning he contrived to get off for an hour and went to Mademoiselle Duval’s lodgings.
 
Denise was out, and Mademoiselle Duval was reading the weekly religious newspaper, which was her sole literary recreation.
 
“Mademoiselle,” said Toni, in a low voice, so that his mother, on the same floor, might not hear him, “this afternoon, I believe, we are all to go for an excursion to the Golden Lion and have tea in the garden. I want to ask you, as a favor, not to mention to my mother that the place is full of snakes of all sorts. I have been there often, and I have never gone in my life that I did not see a snake, and sometimes half a dozen, in that garden. They are not at all dangerous, but if my mother saw one it would alarm her so much, and I don’t wish her to know that there are any to be seen.”
 
“Aw—aw—aw!” Mademoiselle Duval shrieked. “You may take your mother if you like, Toni, but nothing on earth would induce me to go.”
 
Toni could have hugged her on the spot, but he began to urge her.
 
“Pray, Mademoiselle, don’t think of remaining behind. The snakes are perfectly harmless, I assure you. Most of them are the little green garter snakes that are as harmless as the garter you wear around your leg.”
 
This speech caused Mademoiselle Duval to blush, and she said sternly:
 
“Toni, your language and allusion are most improper. At all events, I am resolved not to go to the Golden Lion this afternoon.”
 
“It will annoy the sergeant very much if you don’t go, and if he knows that it is on account of a few little garter snakes he will laugh at you for the rest of your life, particularly as it is now September and they are not very active.”
 
 
“My brother may laugh at me as much as he likes,” replied Mademoiselle Duval, privately resolving not to give the sergeant the chance. “I simply shall not go. Perhaps I may make some excuse to keep my brother and Denise from urging me, but I shall not go—of that you may be sure—and I think you are a most undutiful son to take your mother to any such place. As for my brother and Denise, they go about as if there were no such things as snakes in the world.”
 
CHAPTER XV
 Toni returned to the barracks confident of victory, and was not at all surprised when, at five o’clock, he met his mother and the sergeant and Denise at the tram station, to find that Mademoiselle Duval had a raging headache and was compelled to remain at home. The sergeant, too, rather liked the arrangement, except that he was afraid that Denise would not be sufficiently polite to Toni. So, on their way to the rendezvous he had warned her.
 
“Now, Denise,” he said, “I won’t have you running away from Toni and treating him like a dog before his mother this afternoon. You have got to be civil to him.”
 
“Yes, papa,” answered Denise, with the air of a martyr, “I suppose I shall have to be civil to him before his mother, but Toni really bores me dreadfully.” Oh! Denise, what a story-teller you are!
 
When they got on the tram it was so crowded that it was impossible for the party to get seats together, so Denise, making a pretty grimace on the sly at her father, went and sat with Toni quite at the end of the car, and out of sight of her father and Toni’s mother, and her first speech, whispered softly in his ear, was:
 
“Oh, Toni, how nice it is to be together like this.”
 
Toni answered not one word, but he looked at Denise with his whole soul shining out of his lustrous black eyes, and Denise thought him the finest young soldier in the world.
 
It was a warm September afternoon, and their road lay through the beautiful valley of the Seine. There were many family parties on the tram, and when they reached the Golden Lion the large garden and even the orchard beyond were full of tables at which people were eating and drinking. There were plenty of soldiers about, and some of Toni’s comrades would have been very much pleased at an introduction to the sergeant’s pretty daughter, but the sergeant would not oblige them, neither would Toni. The party seated themselves at a table under an acacia tree, which reminded Toni and Denise of that other acacia tree at Bienville under which they had sat and munched and loved in their childhood. Madame Marcel unpacked their lunch basket and they ordered wine and tea from the inn and proceeded to enjoy themselves. Under the combined influence of wine and woman the sergeant grew positively lover-like, and, when their tea was over and they got up to walk about the garden, he very soon managed to have Madame Marcel to himself. He was quite unconscious of being assisted in his manœuvers by Toni and Denise and Madame herself, who had a very good mind to give Toni all possible chances with Denise and her ten thousand francs. So presently Toni found himself alone with Denise in a little nook in the orchard, behind a great clump of dwarf plum trees. The soft light of evening was about them, the air was hushed and the stillness was only broken by the faint and distant sounds of merriment. All the world seemed fair and beautiful and peaceful, and the fairest thing of all to Toni was the blue heaven of Denise’s eyes. She wore a pretty blue gown, and a jaunty black hat upon her blond hair. Her eyes, which were as blue as her gown, were usually downcast, but were now upturned to Toni quite frankly. She had loved Toni as long as he had loved her—indeed, the world without Toni had seemed to her quite an impossible place. He said softly to her:
 
[Pg 217]
 
“Denise, in all those seven years that I did not see you did you ever think of me?”
 
“Yes,” replied Denise. She said this with a simple sincerity that went to Toni’s heart.
 
“You know every time I wrote to my mother I always put the most important line at the bottom—my love to D. She knew what I meant.”
 
“Yes,” said Denise, with a little gasp of pleasure, “she always gave me your message.”
 
“I always felt that sometime or other we should be Denise and Toni as we had been when you were a dear little girl and I was a dirty bad little boy. And Denise, I swear to you, whatever I have done wrong in my life, I have been true to you. I never told any other girl that I loved her, because I never loved any other girl. I took my fling with them, but in every girl I ever saw in my life it seemed to me that I saw something of you, Denise. You need not think that women in the circus are bad just because they are in the circus. There are plenty of them that are just as good in their way as—as Mademoiselle Duval is in hers. They don’t take a religious newspaper, but they stand by each other in their troubles. They help with each other’s children and when a woman’s husband gives her a black eye all the other women fly at him and help to abuse him. Oh, Denise, I think women are very good, and the worst of them is too good for the best of men. Denise, I am not half good enough for you, but I want you to marry me as soon as my time is up. I can get off with one year’s service if I escape punishments, and that I have done and mean to do, for your sake, Denise.” He took Denise’s hand in his—their eyes met and then their lips. A bird in the plum tree above began cooing softly to its mate. The bird seemed, like Toni and Denise, to think the earth was Heaven.
 
Their love-making was very simple, as were their natures and their lives; they were only a private soldier and a sergeant’s daughter, but they loved each other well and asked nothing better of life than love.
 
Meanwhile things had not been progressing so favorably with Sergeant Duval and Madame Marcel. The sergeant had been a little too vigorous in his wooing and Madame Marcel, who simply had Toni’s advantage in view, felt called on to repress her lover. The sergeant, who had a big voice in his big frame, had made his wishes concerning his future with Madame Marcel quite audible to all the people surrounding them. Everybody had heard him say:
 
“Now, Madame, you should think of changing your condition, really. The cares of your shop are too many for you—a great deal too many.”
 
“I have managed them for the past twenty years,” replied Madame Marcel, who thought herself better qualified to keep a candy shop than the sergeant was, and who understood perfectly what the sergeant was driving at.
 
“True,” said the sergeant, floundering a little, “but a woman should not stand alone—she is not able to do it—that’s the truth. She is being taken advantage of at every turn.”
 
“And sometimes,” calmly responded Madame Marcel, “the advantage is on her side. I have managed, during my twenty years of widowhood to accumulate a competence. Toni will not be badly off when I die, and when he marries I mean to make him an allowance equal to the income from his wife’s dowry.”
 
This seemed sinful waste to the sergeant, who thought Toni did not deserve such generosity. That superfluity of which Madame Marcel spoke he considered had much better be expended on a worthy veteran who had served his country for more than thirty years, and who would like extremely to end his days in affluence. But it was plain that Madame Marcel had the best of him in the argument that a woman could not take care of herself, so the sergeant changed his tactics.
 
“But it would be so much more comfortable for you, Madame, to have a protector—a husband I mean. Toni will get married and go off, and that will be the end of him.” The sergeant snapped his fingers. “But a kind and affectionate husband, a man of steady habits—”
 
“Most men of bad habits are very steady in those habits,” replied Madame Marcel. She was not a satirist and her remark was the more telling because of her sincerity.
 
“You are right, Madame, but I mean a man of good habits, a man who doesn’t spend most of his time at the wine shops, who has some domestic virtues. I believe, Madame, that the non-commissioned officers in the French army are the finest body of men in the world for domestic life. I never knew a sergeant, or a corporal either for that matter, who was not a good husband.”
 
“Then I couldn’t go amiss if I should take any one of them,” answered Madame Marcel demurely. “There is a very nice man, a corporal lately retired, who has bought out the cigar shop near me at Bienville. Gossip has linked our names together, but I had not thought of marrying him.”
 
“By no means should you marry him,” cried the sergeant, realizing that he had been too general in his commendations. “He is probably after your shop and after that nice little competence, which, I judge from your words, you have accumulated. No, Madame, you could aspire to a sergeant—it would be sinful to throw yourself away on a corporal.”
 
Madame Marcel smiled mysteriously, but a good many of the listeners smiled quite openly, particularly a party of soldiers near them. One of them behind Madame Marcel’s back undertook to enact the part of Madame Marcel while his comrade, mimicking every action of the sergeant’s, managed to convulse all who observed him as he followed this love scene. The sergeant folded his arms, twirled his dyed mustaches, and reflected. He had not made a single breach in the defense as yet. He had heard that women were easily made jealous, so he concluded to try it as a ruse de guerre.
 
“For my part,” he said, “I have concluded at the end of my present term of enlistment to marry and settle down. I may say to you, Madame, in strict confidence, that I have considered the charms of Mademoiselle Dumont, the dressmaker, whose establishment is a short way from yours, Madame, at Bienville. She is a most estimable woman, of a suitable age, and has given me some marks of encouragement—in fact, I believe it was generally thought among our acquaintances, at the time of my last visit to Bienville, that I should have proposed to Mademoiselle Dumont before I left. My attentions, I admit, had been somewhat compromising. I had sent her a large basket of figs, and, one day, when I went fishing, I also sent her my whole catch, besides having taken her and her sister on an excursion into the country, and having entertained them handsomely. I thought, when I saw Mademoiselle Dumont for the last time, that she seemed a little piqued, and I have reason to know that she reckons herself rather ill-treated by me; but it is by no means unlikely that on my return next summer I shall offer my hand to Mademoiselle Dumont.”
 
“Perhaps you have not heard,” remarked Madame Marcel sweetly, “that Mademoiselle Dumont was married about two months ago to Hermann, the Swiss violinist, who taught Toni to play the violin.”
 
This was a facer for the sergeant, but he carried it off better than could be expected.
 
“So she married Hermann, the fiddler?—a Swiss fiddler! Then she was more chagrined than I supposed. I suspected she would do something rash if I went away without proposing. Poor, poor creature! As for Hermann’s teaching your Toni to play the violin, why Madame, Toni could no more play the fiddle than he can command the regiment. Very well! Mademoiselle Dumont would have been no match for a sergeant. I am glad now that I did not propose to her, as she certainly expected me to do. She is much better matched with a Swiss fiddler than with a sergeant who has seen service for more than thirty years.”
 
The sergeant eyed Madame Marcel closely. Was it possible that this demure and correct person, in her neat black bonnet and graceful mantle, was poking fun at him?—Sergeant Duval, of the dragoons! But Madame Marcel looked so innocent that it was impossible to fathom her; and just then Toni and Denise appeared on the scene. The instant Madame Marcel’s maternal eye fell upon Toni, she knew that something had happened, and that that something was good. And presently it was time to go home, and they all journeyed back to Beaupré. They walked to their lodgings together through the soft purple twilight of September. Toni went with his mother to her room, and, taking her in his arms, poured out his heart to her. His mother kissed him and shed a few tears as mothers will do under those circumstances. And then Toni had to run for the barracks as hard as he could.
 
About nine o’clock, when he was through with his stable work and was standing in the barrack square, he saw Paul Verney passing by. Toni stood at attention, with such a look on his face that Paul Verney stopped and spoke to him.
 
“What do you want, mon enfant?” he said, after that pleasant form of address with which the officers speak to their soldiers.
 
“To see you, sir, in private, for a little while,” answered Toni under his breath.
 
“Very well, then, come to my quarters at half-past nine.”
 
So at half-past nine Toni presented himself at Paul’s quarters. It never seemed to them to be at all strange that Paul should be sitting at his ease, smoking, in the chair before his writing-desk, while Toni stood stiffly at attention. The sympathy which bound them was too close for those trifling distinctions to count, and between the officer sitting and the soldier standing it was still Paul and Toni in private. Paul was smoking now, and on his desk, under the green-shaded lamp, lay a pretty little note. He was composing an answer to it with as much care and precision as if it were a report to the Minister of War. The light of the lamp fell on his blond head and fairish complexion.
 
As Paul looked at Toni, he could not but think how Toni was improved by being made into a soldier. He was certainly the best looking young fellow in Paul’s troop.
 
“Well, Toni,” said Paul, “out with it. I saw you on the tram to-day with Denise.”
 
Toni turned red under his tan and sunburn. His mouth came open in a delighted grin, showing every one of the large, white teeth. He brought his straight, black brows together and said, in that tone of intimacy which carried the officer and the soldier back to the days when they belonged to the great democracy of boys and huddled together in the nook on the old bridge at Bienville:
 
“Denise loves me.” He did not think it necessary to say how much he loved Denise. Paul rose, and, putting both hands on Toni’s shoulders, gave him a vigorous shake of affection.
 
“I am deuced glad to hear it,” he said. “If you don’t behave yourself to that sweet girl after you are married I promise you the handsomest drubbing you ever had in your life. What do you think the sergeant will say?”
 
“God knows!” said Toni, dolefully shaking his head. “I think he wants to marry my mother, or marry the shop, that is. You see his term is up, sir, next year. But I don’t think my mother wants to marry him or anybody else.”
 
“But would it be a good thing if the sergeant thought it would help his chances with your mother if he agreed to let you have Denise?” asked Paul, who was usually the soul of candor, but who, like all men, was Machiavellian in love matters.
 
“That it would, sir,” answered Toni.
 
“Very well,” said Paul, grinning sympathetically at Toni, “I shall speak to the sergeant myself about you. Unluckily the sergeant knows us both too well—he used to see us when we were boys together at Bienville. Still, you have been a good soldier, Toni, and I don’t think anything can be said against you.”
 
“Except—except—” here Toni’s eyes grew wide and bright with fear, “except about Nicolas and Pierre.”
 
“I hope we shall never see or hear anything more of those two rapscallions again,” replied Paul, “and, at all events, it is not worth while to say anything about that part of your life. Toni, you are, in some respects, the greatest coward I ever saw.”
 
“I know,” answered Toni frankly. “I always was, you remember. I can’t help it. But, at least, I am not afraid of horses, nor of guns, nor of fighting, if an officer will only stand by me and look at me very hard.”
 
Paul sat down at the desk and fingered the little note to which he was composing a reply. He began to reflect how much better off Toni was than himself. Toni was not held back from the girl of his choice by any consciousness of inequality in worldly position, although a girl of Denise’s beauty, merit and fortune might certainly look higher than Toni. But Lucie Bernard—when Paul thought of her millions of francs, her beauty, and then saw himself, a sublieutenant of dragoons, the son of a middle-class advocate at Bienville, his heart was like lead in his breast.
 
“Toni,” said he presently, “do you remember how Mademoiselle Lucie Bernard used to look in the old days at Bienville?”
 
“Perfectly,” cried Toni. “Don’t I remember the day that she talked with you in the park when I showed you where she was, and when Madame Ravenel fainted, didn’t I tell you so you could bring the water in your cap? Oh, I remember Mademoiselle Lucie well. She was the prettiest little lady and she is just the same now. I have seen her several times since I have been here and she always smiles and nods at me so sweetly.”
 
Paul could not confide so frankly in Toni as Toni had confided in him, but, nevertheless, they understood each other without any more words. Paul sat and frowned and looked at his note.
 
“Ah, Toni,” he said, “this world is full of thorns for a sublieutenant of dragoons without any fortune. You may go now.”
 
Toni went toward the door but paused, with the knob in his hand. “I think,” he whispered, “you will soon be as happy as I am,” and then he vanished through the door and went clattering down the corridor.
CHAPTER XVI
 After Toni had gone, Paul smoked and looked for a long time at the pretty little note. He got one almost every day. Lucie wished him to come to dinner, or to ride with her, or to send her a book, or to do something which was an excuse to get Paul to the Château Bernard.
 
And it was impossible that Madame Bernard should not know of all this; but Paul remembered, with a groan, that Lucie had always been able to wrap that imposing-looking person around her little finger. And would it be right—would it be a manly thing—for a poor sublieutenant of dragoons to take advantage of this childish fancy? Paul, resting his blond head in both his hands, remembered that sometimes these youthful attachments, which begin, as it were, with one’s first look at life, last throughout the whole play until the curtain goes down at the end. This puzzled him still more, and he suddenly thrust Lucie’s letter, and her sweet image, and Toni, and Bienville and the whole business out of his head, and, taking up a book on Strategy, studied until midnight.
 
The note from Lucie was to ask him to ride with her the next afternoon as she had a new horse and Madame Bernard was not quite willing to trust her alone with a groom. No French girl would have sent such an invitation, but Lucie had acquired, during her two years in America, all the directness, the habit of command, the insight into a man’s mind of an American girl. Among the number of things which amazed but charmed Paul was the astonishing invention Lucie displayed in bringing Paul to her side. Of course, there was nothing for him to do but to accept this invitation to protect Lucie’s life, so the next afternoon they were cantering gaily through the park toward the highroad, with a groom in attendance. As they passed the place where Count Delorme’s body had been found, Lucie turned her head away with something like a shudder.
 
“I always hated him,” she said, “until he was killed, but you can’t hate a dead man.”
 
“I can hate a scoundrel dead or alive,” replied Paul stoutly. “He ruined your sister’s young life, he deserved to die a bad death.”
 
 
“I don’t think Sophie’s life is quite ruined,” said Lucie.
 
They had brought their horses down to a walk and the groom, who had neither eyes nor ears, had fallen a little way behind.
 
“Sophie is married to the man she loves—I am sure she would not change Captain Ravenel for a Marshal of France if she could get him. She has had great sorrows, but she has had great happiness, too. I know perfectly well what Sophie did, and it was not right, but she was cruelly punished for it.”
 
Paul, who was thoroughly French in his ideas of young ladies, was much scandalized at this speech of Lucie’s, but Lucie was more American than French, and Paul knew the limpid innocence of her mind. Still he thought that Lucie should be more guarded in her speech, and thought that if he had the rare good fortune of marrying her, he would make her a little more prudent.
 
They soon struck the highroad and presently were passing through a forest which was intersected by many roads. A crackling of shots was heard in the distance—the troopers were practising at the rifle butts. Paul turned to the groom and told him to ride forward and find out where the butts were, and just then Toni appeared. Saluting Paul, Toni said:
 
“Pardon, sir, but the orders are that no one shall be allowed to cross this road, and you will have to remain sir, if you please, on this side.”
 
“But this lady’s groom is on the other side. He will be back presently,” urged Paul.
 
“Very sorry, sir,” said Toni, with an air of polite determination, “but those are the orders,” and then Paul and Toni saluted gravely, and Toni backed off.
 
This meant that Paul and Lucie would have to take their ride alone through the woods. Paul turned to Lucie and said:
 
“You see, Mademoiselle, how it is—it can not be helped.”
 
“And I am sure I don’t wish it to be helped,” responded Lucie, in that daredevil American manner of hers which shocked and charmed Paul. “Now we can talk freely.”
 
There was, however, a road by which they could get back to the highway, and along this they rode in the bright autumn afternoon. Presently they came to a rivulet into which a little spring bubbled. They stopped to let the horses drink, and when they were on the other side Lucie suddenly raised up and cried:
 
“I want some water, too,” and before Paul could say a word she had slid off her horse and, gathering up the skirt to her habit, ran to the spring. She pulled off her gloves, and dipping up the water in the hollow of her little hand, pretended to drink it, while it splashed all over her fresh, fair face. Paul swung himself off his horse, and, leaning up against a tree, watched Lucie with adoration in his eyes. She had the unconscious grace of a child, but Lucie was no child—she was a woman of gentle, yet fixed resolve, of strong and tender feelings. She was in love with Paul and had been ever since she took his English book away from him that summer afternoon in the park at Bienville so many years ago; and reading Paul’s mind, as she had read that English book, she saw exactly what was in it,—that he was in love with her and withheld by pride, diffidence and generosity, all three excellent qualities in a man’s love. And Lucie, having much practical American sense in her charming head, had realized that an heiress has to be very prudent in the man she marries, and that of all who professed [Pg 235]to love her, Paul was the only one who loved her well and would not tell her of it.
 
She looked at him, her face dimpling with laughter. He was such a great goose, standing there, his eyes devouring her, and gnawing his mustache for fear the words would come out that he wished to hold in.
 
“Paul,” she said, in a soft little voice, and Paul, against his will, was forced to respond, “Lucie.”
 
“Come here,” said Lucie. Paul came—he could no more have held back than he could have stopped breathing. “Lend me your handkerchief.” Paul look his handkerchief out and Lucie wiped her hands upon it, and then, without so much as saying, “By your leave,” stuck it back in the breast of his coat. This Paul thought delightful, but it was not propriety.
 
“Paul,” said Lucie, “suppose war were raging now and you knew there would be a desperate battle to-morrow, what would you say to me now, if you thought this were the very last interview we were to have before you went out on the firing line?”
 
Paul Verney was a man, after all, and his reply to this was very obvious.
 
 
 
“I should say, ‘Lucie, I love you,’” he replied, holding out his hand in which Lucie put hers.
 
“Thank Heaven,” cried Lucie, “at last! I would have proposed to you long before if you had given me the least encouragement, for I made up my mind to marry you just as soon as you made up your mind that you loved me.”
 
She was laughing, but her eyes were dark with feeling and bright with tears.
 
“I have not asked you to marry me,” whispered Paul, his voice trembling a little. “I told you I loved you—no man ever loved a woman more than I love you—but I don’t think that I am any match for you, Lucie, and it never seemed to me quite right that I should take advantage of all the childish things you said to me when we were boy and girl, or of your rashness and imprudence now, for Lucie, you are a very rash and imprudent girl.”
 
“I am the most prudent person living,” whispered Lucie, sidling up to him. “I don’t wish to be married for my money and you are the only man I know who would marry me quicker without my fortune than with it—so Paul—”
 
Paul made one last hopeless and quite desperate stand.
 
 
 
“Oh, Lucie,” he said, “what a villain I am ever to have gone near you after I saw—”
 
“So you saw it, did you?” said Lucie, smiling, but still trembling. “Everybody else saw it—the groom knows it, actually—it’s quite ridiculous”—and then Paul surrendered. A sudden revelation came to him from Lucie’s eyes that his two thousand francs a year mattered no more than her millions—that it was not a question of francs, but of the great master passion, which, when it enters lordly into the abode of a man’s or a woman’s heart, drives out everything else and reigns supreme.
 
They sat on a fallen tree and talked in whispers, those echoes of the heart, until the shadows grew long, and it was Lucie who had to remind Paul that it was time to go home. The horses, which had stood still meanwhile, cocked their ears knowingly at Paul when he swung Lucie into her saddle. They never saw the belated groom at all, nor cared what had become of him as they rode back through the dying glow of the autumn afternoon to the Château Bernard. Lucie ran up the stone steps of the château, followed by Paul. At the prospect of meeting Madame Bernard, this dashing young sublieutenant of dragoons felt as hopeless and helpless as a drenched hen. It was one thing to tell Lucie of his love in the forest glade, to the music of the silvery rippling spring, with the red sun making a somber glory all around them and with no one except the horses to listen, but to tell the chatelaine of the Château Bernard about his two thousand francs the year was almost more than Paul could stand. Lucie led the way into Madame Bernard’s little drawing-room. A wood fire was crackling on the hearth, for the evening had grown chilly, and Madame Bernard, stately and timid, imposing and nervous, with her everlasting embroidery, sat by the table on which stood candles in tall silver candlesticks. Lucie went up and, putting her arm around the neck of the fierce-eyed and craven-hearted old lady, and seating herself on the arm of the chair, tipped the handsome old face up and kissed her.
 
“Grandmama,” she said, “I have proposed and have been accepted. Paul says he will marry me.”
 
Paul glared at Lucie. She was such an unconscionable joker. He came forward, however, and said in his best manner, which was a very fine manner:
 
“Madame, it is I who proposed to Mademoiselle Lucie. If I did not love her so much I should apologize for it, because I feel that she is entitled to more of birth and of fortune and of rank than I can give her. But I can give her more devotion and loyalty than any other man living—of that I feel sure.”
 
Paul fully expected Madame Bernard to box his ears and call a footman to throw him out of the house, but Madame Bernard did nothing of the sort. She sighed a little and looked at Paul. She would have liked a duke, at least, for Lucie—she had got a count for Sophie, but how wretchedly had that match turned out. The habit of obedience was strong upon Madame Bernard, and Lucie was of a nature so willing to take responsibility for herself that it was always difficult to take responsibility for her. Madame Bernard knew she was helpless, but, as Paul had done, she made a feint of resistance.
 
“Of course, Monsieur,” she said in a voice and manner which she vainly tried to make commanding, “in the event this marriage comes off I shall expect you to resign from the army.”
 
Paul turned pale. This thought had never occurred to him before. Resign from the army! And become gentleman usher to a rich wife! Never!
 
“Madame,” he said, “I have little to offer Mademoiselle Lucie, and the best thing, in a worldly point of view, is the career that I hope to make in my profession. That, I may say, if you will permit me, will not be unworthy of Mademoiselle Lucie’s acceptance, I trust.”
 
“Good for you, Paul,” cried Lucie, “what you say is quite right, and, grandmama, you might as well make up your mind to it. When Paul and I are married I shall have to live in all sorts of dull little towns and poky little holes and perhaps go to Algiers. I shall have to do just what any other sublieutenant’s wife has to do, and I shall like it above all things. It will be like a masquerade, for we shall know when Paul is a lieutenant-colonel, then we can live handsomely and enjoy our money.”
 
Lucie’s quick and comprehensive mind had already gone forward and spanned the gulf between a sublieutenant and a lieutenant-colonel. Madame Bernard sighed again. All womanly women are natural romancers and love a lover, and she did not think less of Paul for his determined stand. She began to see dimly that this prompt and quiet decision in Paul’s character was one of the reasons why Lucie loved him, and it would be the most wholesome corrective possible to the faults in Lucie’s temperament.
 
 
“As to the question of my consent, Monsieur,” said Madame Bernard grimly, “that seems to have been settled in advance by Lucie and yourself.”
 
Lucie chased away the grimness from the old lady’s face by kissing her.
 
“Suppose we postpone consideration of this for a short time—a week, perhaps, you will allow me.”
 
Paul was about to say, “Certainly, Madame,” when Lucie interrupted him.
 
“Say yes, Paul, it will amuse grandmama and won’t hurt us the least in the world.” And then she kissed Madame Bernard all over her face and cried: “Go home, Paul, and come early to-morrow. Grandmama will be dying to see you!”
 
Paul left the château in much better case than he expected and had a rapturous ride back in the twilight with a shy young moon looking and laughing at him.
 
As he rode into the barracks yard he passed Toni, carrying a big bucket of water in either hand. As he rode past he said in a whisper:
 
“You brought me good fortune to-day.”
 
“And it’s all settled?” asked Toni, in another whisper.
 
“Quite so, I think,” replied Paul, flinging himself off his horse. “I will do a good turn by you with the sergeant to-morrow morning.”
 
When he got back to his quarters Powder, who had spent a lonely afternoon, rushed at him with yaps of delight. Paul, twisting the dog’s ears, whispered: “My lad, you and I have just got a new commanding officer. Hurrah, you rascal!”
 
And Powder immediately gave a series of terrific yelps which he had been taught to believe were hurrahs!
 
The next morning Paul had two errands which took him out very early. One was to send a bouquet to Lucie, and the other was to have an interview with Sergeant Duval. He caught the sergeant just coming out of the riding-hall. Everything had gone well that day and the sergeant was smiling.
 
“Well, sergeant,” cried Paul, coming up to him, “so I understand that my old friend Toni and Mademoiselle Denise are to be married.”
 
“I had not heard the news, sir,” responded Sergeant Duval, stiffening. “I thank you for acquainting me with it.”
 
“The fact is,” said Paul, “Toni is terribly afraid of you, and he asked me to make the communication. I thought perhaps something had passed between your sister and Toni’s mother, but, at all events, you know as much about Toni as anybody. He is an excellent fellow, a fine soldier, and has been in love with Mademoiselle Denise ever since he was a small boy.”
 
“There were more small bad boys in Bienville than any place I ever saw, sir,” was the sergeant’s discouraging reply, “and Toni was about the worst of the lot.”
 
“Come, now, sergeant, you are too hard on Toni. He was no worse than I was. All small boys are bad, but all of them that I have ever seen had something good about them. Madame Marcel, you know, is well-to-do, and when Toni’s time is up he can get a place, I know, as instructor in a riding-school at three hundred francs the month. I don’t think Mademoiselle Denise will do ill if you take Toni for a son-in-law.”
 
The sergeant twisted his mustache reflectively.
 
“And beside that,” continued Paul, who had become a marvel of duplicity, “I understand that Madame Marcel is smiling on you. A remarkably fine, handsome man you are, sergeant, and I am not surprised that Madame Marcel likes you, but she would like you a great deal better if you would give Denise to Toni. You see, it would be a nice, family arrangement.”
 
A pleased grin overspread the sergeant’s face.
 
“Well, sir,” he replied, “a man does not take a husband for his only child without looking well about him. It is true that Madame Marcel is well-to-do, and I could tie up Denise’s dowry so that Toni couldn’t touch it, and perhaps I will think it over, sir, and let you know.”
CHAPTER XVII
 The sergeant’s views on the subject of Toni’s marriage to Denise were very much enlightened that afternoon by Madame Marcel’s requesting an interview with him in her own room. The sergeant arrayed himself in his best uniform, paid a visit to the barber, waxed and dyed his mustaches to the ultimate point, and then presented himself at Madame Marcel’s door. Madame Marcel was the most unsophisticated of women, but this did not mean that she could not play a part, and play it well. Her part was to persuade the sergeant that, after Toni and Denise were married, she herself might become Madame Duval, a thing she had not the slightest idea of doing. So she received the sergeant in the most gracious manner, smiled at him, talked about the happiness of their children, and seemed to think that married life was the only road to real bliss, and that one could not marry too early or too often. The sergeant saw that she had set her heart on the marriage between Toni and Denise and that [Pg 246]he would stand no chance whatever of establishing himself in the comfortable back room of Madame Marcel’s shop unless he agreed to the match. So far he was quite correct, but in his further assumption that by agreeing to it he was making good his title to the armed chair which he coveted by the kitchen stove, he was miles out of the way.
 
The result, however, was the same—that after much running to and fro, and as many legal documents for Denise’s ten thousand francs as for Lucie’s fortune, the matter was arranged; and on the day fortnight that they had made a family party to the Golden Lion and had eaten and drunk in the garden, they made an excursion to the same place to celebrate the betrothal of Toni and Denise. It was too late then to sit out of doors, so they had their little feast in a private room of the Golden Lion with a glowing fire on the hearth. Madame Marcel insisted on being the hostess on this occasion, and ordered a truly gorgeous supper. There was a heart-shaped cake on the table with love birds pecking at orange blossoms, and all the candies were hearts and darts and loves and doves. Everything wore a sort of St. Valentine’s air. Denise, in a beautiful pink silk gown, sat next Toni [Pg 247]at the table. There were several of the Duvals’ friends and two or three of Toni’s comrades.
 
When it was time to drink the bride’s health, Toni went a message out to where Madame Bernard’s carriage stood in the courtyard. Out stepped Paul and Lucie, leaving Madame Bernard in the carriage. When they appeared in the supper-room there was a general commotion. Toni had kept this impending honor a secret from every one, except Denise, and Sergeant Duval was the more impressed by the compliment of Paul Verney’s coming through having it sprung on him as a surprise. Lucie shook hands with Toni, kissed Denise on the cheek, remembered the Sergeant and Mademoiselle Duval and Madame Marcel, bestowed bows and smiles on all present, and, as she always did, brought an atmosphere of kindness and gaiety with her. Paul shook Toni’s hand and pronounced an eulogy upon him, looking gravely into Toni’s eyes at the time, and neither one of them winked. He spoke as if, when Toni’s time was up and he should leave the regiment, he would be as much missed as the colonel himself. Then he proposed the health of the betrothed pair and it was drunk with all honors.
 
The two pairs of lovers looked at each other—[Pg 248]it recalled their childish days at Bienville. How seldom does the course of true love run smooth, and how smoothly had it run for them. Then Lucie and Paul left, having almost persuaded the Duval faction that they had done themselves great honor by securing Toni for Denise.
 
The next morning it was Paul Verney’s turn at the riding-school, and as he walked along in the crisp autumn air, feeling as if Heaven was around him as well as above him, he came face to face with Toni. Toni’s eyes were wide and dark with terror, his face was pale and he gnawed his mustache furiously. The change since Paul had seen him the night before was enough to shock any one. Toni did not wait to be asked what was the matter, but, coming close to Paul, said in his ear:
 
“They are here—Pierre and Nicolas—they lay in wait for me when I got back to the barracks last night—they were in the batch of recruits that came in yesterday.”
 
“What of it?” said Paul, who was not easily shaken.
 
“They told me that unless I stood by them they would tell all about—those—those things that happened when I was in the circus, and about Count [Pg 249]Delorme’s death, and the rest of it. You know, sir, I am as innocent—as innocent—” He pointed upward to a bird that sang and swung upon a bough close by. His speech seemed to fail him. Nicolas and Pierre in a single night had resumed all their old sway over him; he was once more under the dominion of fear.
 
“They were not conscripted, those two rascals?” said Paul.
 
“No, they told me that the authorities were hot after them about the Delorme matter. A twenty-franc piece was found which had a mark on it and was traced to Count Delorme. It was the piece which they put in my pocket and which I threw after them. Nothing could actually be discovered against them, but they could not well get out of the way, so they concluded the best thing to do was to enlist in a dragoon regiment, and as they couldn’t get away from this part of the country, they thought it best not to try, and so came here.”
 
Toni wiped his forehead, on which the big drops stood.
 
“Toni”—Paul spoke sharply—“be a man. Do you suppose when Denise promised to marry you that she thought she was marrying a poltroon to be [Pg 250]scared by a ghost—afraid of a whisk of a rabbit’s tail?”
 
Toni groaned heavily. The little while that he had been free from fear of his secret made its return seem the more dreadful to him.
 
“It’s—it’s—it’s a very horrible thing to feel that you have two men at your heels ready to swear that you have been engaged in murder and robbery and arson.”
 
“But if you have not committed murder and robbery and arson, you have nothing to fear,” replied Paul, speaking sternly. Toni made no answer, but shook his head. Paul then tried persuasion on him, but nothing could lessen Toni’s fear of his two old companions.
 
Paul went on to the riding-school. Pierre and Nicolas, proud of their accomplishments as riders, were anxious to exhibit their skill. Neither of them was as graceful a rider as Toni though, and Nicolas was beetle-browed and red-headed, while Pierre was a combination of a fox and a monkey. Sergeant Duval was a judge of men, and not all their accomplishments inclined him favorably toward them, nor did he, after a month’s trial, have reason to reverse his opinion, for, from the beginning, two [Pg 251]worse soldiers could not be found. They were always under punishment; they either would not or could not learn their duty, and it was a source of regret to their superiors that they would receive so many punishments they would probably be obliged to serve another enlistment. The sergeant did his whole duty in reporting them, and Paul Verney, in whose troop they were, in punishing them. Paul very much hoped that they would reach the limit and have to be sent to Algiers as disciplinaires.
 
Toni went about like a man in a dream. Part of the time he was the happiest fellow alive, and part of the time the most miserable. In his happiest moments with Denise, he was haunted by a dread of what Nicolas and Pierre might do, and in his paroxysms of fear, when he waked in the night and lay still and trembling amid the snoring troopers around him in the barracks, the thought of Denise comforted him. For Denise found out that there was something the matter with him, and gently chid him for not telling her, and when Toni would not, for indeed he could not, poor frightened fellow that he was, tell her, Denise did not grow petulant, but showed him a tender confidence. There was much more in Denise than mere prettiness and [Pg 252]blondness and neatness and coquetry. She was a soldier’s daughter and was not without some of Sergeant Duval’s resolution. So Toni found that with all his grief and anxiety he had the quiet, unspoken and, therefore, more helpful sympathy of the woman he loved. Denise did not worry him with questions—that was much.
 
The sergeant and all the men in the troop knew of Toni’s former associations in the circus with Nicolas and Pierre, but as neither of the two latter had succeeded in making himself an object of admiration to his comrades, nothing they could say would injure Toni. Still, they maintained their strange power over him. Toni would have liked never to speak to them nor to be seen with them, but when they would come after him he had no capacity of resistance—he would go with them, cursing them, but unable to withstand them.
 
In the spring he was relieved of some of this. Pierre and Nicolas had taken a special spite against their sublieutenant, Paul Verney, and they had shamefully abused one of his favorite chargers. Paul promptly procured for them two months’ incarceration in the military prison. These were two months of Paradise to Toni. He had in him some[Pg 253]thing of a happy-go-lucky disposition, and although he could not shake off his miserable secret he could put it out of sight for a while. It did not trouble him much in the day, but never failed to visit him at night.
 
It was known, by that time, that he was to marry Denise when the sergeant should retire on his pension, which would be a year from the coming summer. Like a lover, Toni had protested strongly against this, but, as a matter-of-fact, it did not greatly affect his happiness. He liked playing the part of a lover and reasoned, with true Toni philosophy, that he might well enjoy the present without hungering too much after the future. He saw Denise every day, danced with her three times a week, spent every Sunday when he was off duty with her, and ate, several times a week, most agreeable dishes prepared by Denise’s own hands.
 
Madame Marcel, meanwhile, had returned to Bienville, but promised to make Toni another visit before long. She left the sergeant far from hopeless, and by enclosing a special package of chocolate in the New Year box which she sent Toni and Denise, gave him great hopes. In fact, under Toni’s able instruction, Madame Marcel was play[Pg 254]ing the sergeant with great skill and finesse, and that infatuated person never suspected it.
 
It was a happy time with Paul Verney, too. Like Toni, he was an accepted lover, but his marriage was to come off in June. He had taken a small, pretty house in the town, for although Madame Bernard urged and even commanded that the new married pair should live with her, Paul Verney had a sturdy independence about him. His two thousand francs would pay the rent of his house and his parents, by skimping and screwing in every possible way, managed to scrape up two thousand francs more, without letting Paul know how much it encroached on their narrow income. But Lucie, with her quick American sense, saw through it in an instant and positively refused to let Paul take it under any circumstances.
 
“Paul,” she said, when the subject was broached between them, “I am willing to play at being poor for your sake and for the looks of the thing, but how absurd it is for us not to enjoy what is ours.”
 
“What is yours, you mean,” mumbled Paul.
 
“But yours and ours do not exist between persons who love and understand each other as we do. I wish, from the bottom of my heart, it were yours [Pg 255]instead of mine—then, I should not have to be so particular always to say ours.”
 
So Paul Verney, like other men, had to yield to the inevitable feminine, and although they were to live modestly enough, it was, as Lucie said, mere playing at poverty. It seemed to Paul, in fulfilling his childish romance as Toni had fulfilled his, that they were drawn nearer together even than when they were boys at Bienville. The relation of master and servant, which had always been a fiction of the imagination so to speak, seemed to vanish wholly. Toni was Paul’s humble friend and confidant. When Paul would come home, after dining at the Château Bernard and an evening spent basking in Lucie’s smiles and glances, he would feel as if he were stepping on air, and there Toni would be, standing at the window drawing pictures of Denise in an old copy-book. He would glance with a roguish smile at Paul as he helped him off with his clothes, and say:
 
“Mademoiselle has been kind to-night, hasn’t she?”
 
“Yes, she is always kind—the darling,” Paul would reply.
 
“And the old lady?”
 
[Pg 256]
 
“When she is got up in her velvet gown and her big silk mantle, and her bonnet with plumes on it, she always reminds me of the general’s charger at a grand parade. And she is about as much to be feared,” said Paul, laughing. “I would rather encounter a dozen Madame Bernards than one Sergeant Duval. I think the sergeant lives for the purpose of catching you tripping—that is to say in the event that your mother doesn’t marry him.”
 
“Women are the oddest creatures in the world,” Toni said solemnly, blinking his eyes. “There’s my mother. She has been a widow for twenty years and, if you believe me, the way she is fooling the sergeant would put a sixteen-year-old girl to the blush.” Then Toni told about the box of chocolate. “And it will be boxes of chocolate straight along until she gets me married to Denise, and then—pouf!—away will go the sergeant. She would not marry him to save his life. The sergeant is a fine man, too—better than I am, but she loves me best.”
 
These hours of confidence were not among the least pleasant in the lives of Paul and Toni.
CHAPTER XVIII
 Early in the month of June, the month of roses, the wedding of Paul and Lucie came off. The civil wedding occurred one day, but the great event was the religious ceremony on the next day. It took place in the garrison chapel, which was beautifully decorated for the occasion. It was a very grand wedding, for the Bernards were great people, but it was likewise a very happy wedding. A great many persons wondered why a girl of Lucie Bernard’s beauty, fortune and position should marry a little sublieutenant of dragoons, but when they came to see and know the little sublieutenant, and how much liked and respected he was by everybody, it did not seem remarkable at all. Lucie’s most valued wedding present was a huge amethyst bracelet, bought by the voluntary subscriptions of the men in Paul’s own troop out of their small pay. Lucie wore it at her wedding, her only other ornament being a modest pearl brooch which was Paul’s gift.
 
[Pg 258]
 
It was a glorious June day when Lucie Bernard became Lucie Verney. The garrison chapel was packed, and Sergeant Duval commanded the guard of honor. Toni, who had helped to dress Paul for the great occasion, scampered off, with Powder under his arm, to the church, where he met Denise and her aunt. He escorted them to seats of honor reserved for them, a compliment to Toni which materially improved his standing with Mademoiselle Duval. The church was filled with music from the great organ, and outside the air was melodious with the song of birds and the rustling of leaves and the swaying of blossoms. Among the happiest faces in the church were those of Monsieur and Madame Verney, and also two persons that Toni had not seen for a long time, Captain and Madame Ravenel. Madame Ravenel was, for once, not in black, and her pale beauty was set off by a white gown. Her usually sad face wore a happy and tremulous smile. She felt herself the forgiven sinner and was not, as most sinners are, proud of her sins and contemptuous of their forgiveness. Lucie had demanded that Sophie and her husband be asked to the wedding and even to stay as guests at the Château Bernard. Madame Bernard, after having pro[Pg 259]tested, vowed and declared for six months that such should not be the case, promptly capitulated three weeks before the wedding. This meant the complete rehabilitation of Captain and Madame Ravenel and their return to that world from which their own desperate act had hurled them for a time. They had humbled themselves and had been punished, and had taken their punishment as proud and honorable souls do, acknowledging its justice and making no outcry. But now it was over, and forgiveness had been won for them by Lucie Bernard’s generous and determined little hand, which had never ceased to labor for them since she was ten years old.
 
While the church full of people was awaiting the entrance of the bride and bridegroom, Toni whispered to Denise that they would be married in the same church and that he expected to be as happy as Monsieur Paul, who was the happiest man he had ever seen. Paul’s countenance, when he stood before the altar with Lucie on his arm, fully sustained this. Many bridegrooms wear a hunted and dejected appearance, but not so Paul Verney, although he had been hunted and captured by the charming creature at his side. Lucie, for once, was subdued, but her pallor and the tears that trem[Pg 260]bled in her dark eyes did her as much honor as Paul’s happy countenance. She was asking herself all the time if she were really worthy of a man like Paul. But she recovered all her composure when they turned and marched out of the church together and passed under the uplifted swords of the guard of honor, and she was quite smiling and self-possessed, looking about her with the laughing, playful, penetrating glance peculiarly her own, and holding up her arm on which the big bracelet shone, to the delight of the honest hearts of the soldiers.
 
There was a large wedding breakfast at the Château Bernard, which was at its loveliest in June, with its broad, green terraces, its plashing fountains and the riot of color in its prim flower beds. The guests sat at many little tables on the broad terrace, where the bride and groom and the wedding party had a very gorgeous one in the middle, just by the fountain, which sparkled brilliantly in the sunshine. A little way off, in a grove of elm trees, a table was set for the soldiers who had acted as the guard of honor at the wedding ceremony. Their wives and sweethearts were included, and here Toni was the great man, second only to Sergeant Duval, who was the ranking non-commis[Pg 261]sioned officer present. Toni was the bridegroom’s humble friend and everybody knew the closeness of the tie which had existed between them since boyhood.
 
Toni made a speech which was a marvel of elegance and correctness. It had been written for him by Paul Verney two weeks before, and he had spent the whole fortnight getting it by heart. But at the end Toni suddenly burst into an impromptu speech of his own.
 
“The lieutenant,” he said, “is the best lieutenant, he is the best man, he is the best master, he is the best of everything—”
 
Here Toni, without the least expectation on his part, suddenly found the tears rolling down his cheeks. He laughed and could not imagine what he was crying for and then his fellows all applauded him vociferously, and Toni sat down and was not able to say another word. And then, when they were through with their breakfast, they saw the bride and groom approaching, Lucie holding up her dainty white skirts, her filmy veil floating about her and with nothing on her dark hair except her wedding veil and wreath. Paul carried his helmet with its horse-hair plume in his hand, and the sun [Pg 262]shone on his happy sunburned face as he led Lucie to where their humble friends were making merry. Toni had hauled out, from under the table, a mysterious box filled with ice and with long-necked bottles, and champagne was soon bubbling in every glass. The sergeant made a speech quite out of his own head, and much better than Toni’s, in which he assured Paul Verney of what he knew before—that his troop would die for him to a man. Paul returned thanks and declared that he was conscious of commanding the finest troop in the French army, and then Lucie said a few pretty words of thanks and held up her arm with the great bracelet on it and showed that she had worn no other ornament except that and the bridegroom’s gift. Then there were more cheers, more champagne, more of everything. It was a very happy wedding because it made many persons happy.
 
The very happiest person at the wedding, next to Paul and Lucie, was Madame Verney. That excellent woman was fully persuaded that by her efforts alone and single-handed, she had brought about this match between Paul and Lucie, which otherwise never would have taken place. The relatives and friends of the Bernards were very grand [Pg 263]people, indeed, but Paul had no reason to be ashamed of his family contingent.
 
When the guests were all gone and only the family remained, Toni requested Paul to let the party from Bienville, consisting of himself and the Duvals, speak to the Bienville persons present—the Verneys and the Ravenels,—and this Paul very gladly did. The Ravenels and the Verneys were very kind, as was their nature, to their humbler friends from their native town. Paul did Toni a very good service by proclaiming before all the Bienville people, in Sergeant Duval’s presence, that Toni was the best fellow alive and the sergeant was doing well to betroth his daughter to such an excellent fellow. This was accepted by the Bienville people because on that glorious day everything went well. They could not but observe, however, that Toni was clean instead of being dirty, and Paul assured them that he had become as industrious as he had before been idle.
 
When the carriage drove off, in the summer dusk, with the bride and groom starting on their wedding journey, Toni was the last person with whom they shook hands, as he arranged them comfortably, and then Toni whispered to Denise:
 
[Pg 264]
 
“We will be just as happy as they some day.”
 
The next morning Toni waked up with a feeling of happiness which had been gradually growing on him ever since he had become a private soldier under Paul Verney. This made him long to whistle and sing like a blackbird had not the regulations forbidden soldiers to sing like blackbirds while at their duties. But the first sight that greeted him, as he marched on the parade ground, gave him an unpleasant shock. There were Nicolas and Pierre in the ranks. Their term of imprisonment had expired, and these two unworthy citizens were restored to their duties.
 
Toni avoided them all day long as much as he could, and in the evening, being off duty, he went into the town to see Denise. After spending half an hour with her, sitting on a bench in the public square while Mademoiselle Duval read her inevitable religious newspaper, a drizzle of rain coming on, he escorted his fiancée and his future aunt-in-law to their lodging, then walked down into the town to spend the hour that yet remained to him before he was obliged to turn in. The night had grown dark and stormy and the rain had become a determined downpour. The street lamps shone fitfully out of [Pg 265]the gloom, but the windows of the cheap cafés, where the soldiers congregated, were resplendent with lights.
 
Toni was standing before one of these and debating whether he should go in when he felt an arm on each side of him. He looked around and Nicolas’ red head was close to his ear, while Pierre’s monkey face was on the other side of him.
 
“Come,” said Nicolas, “I know where we can get a good bottle of wine and have a game of cards.”
 
Toni could easily have wrenched himself free from them, but his old cowardice returned to him with a rush. He went sullenly with them under a moral compulsion which he could not have explained to save his life. He hated and feared their company; nevertheless, he went with them. They turned into a dark and narrow side street and then, diving into a blind alley so dark and noisome that Toni’s heart sank within him at the thought of the crimes that could be committed there, they climbed a rickety outside stair by the side of a tumble-down old house. Toni found himself presently in a garret room, dimly lighted by a malodorous oil lamp. It was evidently a place of entertainment for a low class of persons. There were sounds of [Pg 266]voices below them and next them, but this room was unoccupied. There was a table in the middle of the floor and wine and glasses on it. Toni sat down, much against his will, and Pierre, pouring out some of the wine, which was vile, began to expatiate on the delights of liberty.
 
“This is a million times better,” he said, “than being locked up in prison with the devil of a sentry keeping his eye on one perpetually and three days on bread and water for sneezing.”
 
Toni longed to say that that was what both of them richly deserved, but dared not. Then Nicolas began:
 
“We should not have been imprisoned at all but for that scoundrel, Lieutenant Verney. He has a spite against us and takes it out as only an officer can on a private soldier.”
 
“It’s a lie,” cried Toni. This aspersion on their honor was not in the least resented by either Pierre or Nicolas, who knew, as only they and God did, what liars they were.
 
“Well, Toni,” Nicolas continued, “I understand that you are to marry the sergeant’s daughter. My faith, you look prosperous. Count Delorme’s money must have done you a lot of good.”
 
[Pg 267]
 
“I never had any of Count Delorme’s money!” burst out Toni.
 
“Who is lying now?” murmured Nicolas softly. “What about the twenty-franc piece?”
 
“That was certainly a very neat job of yours, Toni,” said Pierre. “I have never seen a man done for quicker than you did for Count Delorme. One blow like this—” He drew off and went through a pantomime of giving Nicolas a blow on the side of the head. Nicolas, likewise pretending, tumbled over in his chair as Count Delorme had fallen over in the dark at the Château Bernard. It made Toni sick to see them. They laughed, after they had gone through with this mimic tragedy, and began to drink their wine. Then they again abused Paul Verney, and Toni said nothing. He scorned to defend his friend from two such scoundrels as those before him and he longed to get away, but that strange and inscrutable fear of them nailed him to his chair. Presently Nicolas said to him:
 
“Toni, we might as well tell you the truth. Lieutenant Verney is to die.”
 
To die! Paul, so full of life, so happy, only yesterday married! He saw Paul’s smiling face as he waved his hand back to Toni when he drove off in [Pg 268]the open carriage with Lucie, through the golden dusk of the June evening. But he did not quite take in what Nicolas meant.
 
“Yes,” said Pierre, “have you never heard, my man, of officers who abused and ill-treated their men, who were found dead like Count Delorme?—I won’t say murdered—that’s an ugly word to say. But it isn’t altogether safe for an officer to persecute a man, particularly a couple of men—it’s just as well to make an example of an officer like that once in a while.”
 
A cold horror came upon Toni. After a moment he spoke.
 
“So you mean to waylay Lieutenant Verney as you did Count Delorme?” he asked.
 
“No indeed, my dear fellow,” briskly responded Nicolas. “It will be quite a different affair from that little one of yours. We mean to kill him, however, but we will try our chances among the three of us. We don’t care to take the whole risk ourselves, and I think, considering how quiet we have kept about that little affair of yours in the park of the Château Bernard that you ought to help us out. So we will play a game of cards and the loser is to finish up Lieutenant Verney or be finished up [Pg 269]himself. That is quite fair. Don’t you agree to that, Pierre?”
 
Pierre nodded and grinned. Toni sat looking at them stupidly by the light of the oil lamp. He took in instantly what they meant—they intended that he should kill Paul Verney or else be killed himself. Nicolas took out of his pocket a greasy pack of cards and said:
 
“What shall it be—écarté?”
 
“As you please,” responded Pierre.
 
Toni would have given his soul, almost, to have rushed out of the room, but he was Toni still as boy and man. He had been cowed and enslaved by certain strange fears which many persons exercised over him, and these scoundrels in particular. He thought of himself as murdered by these wretches, who, he knew, would do it with as little compunction as they would wring the neck of a chicken. He thought of Denise, of Paul Verney, and he was overwhelmed with sorrow for them and pity for himself, for he understood that he must die.
 
The cards were dealt and Toni took his up. He was in a horrible dream, but he retained enough of his faculties to know how the game was going. Nicolas and Pierre were quite cheerful and they [Pg 270]squabbled merrily over the game and took all the tricks. When they had finished, Nicolas slapped Toni on the back and said jovially:
 
“Well, my man, you have got the job.”
 
Toni made no reply. He was too frightened to speak, and then Nicolas, suddenly growing perfectly serious, said:
 
“You know we begin our practice marches in about a fortnight. Now, on our first practice march you are to be ill and drop out of the ranks—see?—when the lieutenant is riding by the side of the troop where he can see you, and you must select a place where there is a thicket in which a man’s body can be hid from the observation of the people passing by. Now, when the lieutenant comes back to see what is the matter with you, it will be quite easy—he will be completely off his guard—and then—you had better do it with a knife—a knife makes no noise, you know, and if you don’t know how to use a knife on Lieutenant Verney—well, we’ll use it on you—that’s all—and on Lieutenant Verney later.”
 
Toni’s arms dropped by his side and he uttered a low groan. What folly ever had thrown him with these men—what madness was his not to have come [Pg 271]out and told the truth about Count Delorme! And now his life must pay the penalty for it, and just as it was growing so sweet to him. He staggered to his feet and groped his way to the door, Pierre and Nicolas making no effort to stop him. They saw that they had fully impressed him with what they meant to do.
 
CHAPTER XIX
 Toni got back to the barracks, he knew not how, stumbling along through the rain and darkness, and throwing himself on his rough bed lay awake and agonized the whole night through until the bugle call next morning. He could not eat that whole day nor sleep the next night and pined like a woman. During that day he saw Nicolas and Pierre a dozen times at least, and they always flashed him a mocking glance which he understood perfectly well and which gave him a feeling as if a red-hot iron hand were clutching his heart, for Toni was of an imaginative nature.
 
He did not see Denise that day, and spent another sleepless and horror-stricken night. The next morning it occurred to him, as a means of escaping Denise’s tender and searching eyes, as well as the hateful company of Pierre and Nicolas, that he might possibly sham illness and be sent to the hospital. He did not need to sham, however—he was in a high fever and the surgeon swore at him [Pg 273]for not reporting before, so he found a temporary haven of refuge in the hospital. There he spent several days. The doctor, who was a clever young fellow, was a good deal puzzled by the case. He could not make out whether Toni was malingering or not. He evidently wished to be considered ill—at the same time there were indications about him of his being really ill. If he had not had the reputation of being an admirable soldier, the doctor would have suspected Toni had done something wrong and was in hiding, as it were, in the hospital.
 
The sergeant called to see him and was rather rough with him considering that nothing was the matter with Toni.
 
“Do you think I would lie here and take all these nasty messes if there were nothing the matter with me?” cried poor Toni.
 
There was indeed something very serious the matter with him, but it was a kind of suffering which not all the doctor’s instruments and medicines could reach. Denise, with her aunt, called twice to see him, but both times Toni feigned to be asleep as soon as he distinguished their voices, and it was against the rules to disturb him.
 
A week passed, on the second morning of which [Pg 274]he found a long, sharp knife under his pillow, and at the end of that time the doctor turned Toni out of the hospital, much against the latter’s will. He had then to resume his duties, of course, and affect cheerfulness as well as he could. He succeeded rather better in the last respect than might have been expected, and Denise only saw in him the weakness and lassitude which she thought were due to his recent illness.
 
On the day fortnight after Paul Verney’s wedding, he returned with his bride—the honeymoon of a sublieutenant is inevitably brief. The very next day the practice march was to begin and Toni did not see Paul Verney until the next morning when the troop was forming in the barracks square.
 
The regiment marched out with colors flying to do a practice march of two days’ duration. Paul was riding at the head of his troop. He was a fine horseman and had a good military air and everything about him was spick and span as becomes an officer.
 
Toni, who was at the end of the file, got a good look at Paul as he cantered along by the side of the troopers and a look of affectionate intelligence flashed between the two young men. Toni saw that [Pg 275]Paul was truly happy—he was in fact always happy when performing his military duties, because he was born a soldier, apt at obedience and ready at command. In the same file with Toni rode Nicolas and Pierre.
 
They passed out of the town on the dusty highroad, their helmets gleaming in the sun and the steady tramp of their horses’ hoofs sounding like thunder on the highroad and raising a great white dust like a pillar of cloud by day. Crowds of people ran out to see them, and cheered them as they passed. The day was bright and warm, but not hot enough to distress either the men or the horses. They kept on steadily until noon, when there was an hour of rest and refreshment. Again they took up the line of march. A cool breeze was blowing and it was as pleasant a June day as one could wish for marching. Towards three o’clock, as they were passing the outskirts of a wood, Toni put his hand to his head and reeled in his saddle. His horse kept on steadily in the ranks. It was very well simulated and Paul rode up and caught Toni by the arm.
 
“You had better drop out,” he said, “and rest a while by the roadside and rejoin when you feel bet[Pg 276]ter.” Toni touched his cap and said, “Thank you, sir,” and slipping out of his saddle, led his horse to a grassy place under a tree, where he sat down and mopped his face. He looked quite pale and weak, but the surgeon, when he rode up, gave him a sharp look, made him drink some wine and water out of his canteen, and said: “You will be all right in ten minutes,” and rode on.
 
Ten minutes passed and twenty and thirty. The regiment was out of sight. Toni’s troop was a part of the rear guard. The dull echo of thousands of hoofs still resounded afar off, but all else was quiet in that shaded woody spot, with farm-houses basking in the sun, the highroad gleaming whitely, and the railway beyond making two streaks of steel-blue light in the distance. Toni, with his helmet off, and his horse browsing quietly near him, sat on the ground under the shade with the glaring midday light around him and waited for Paul Verney, who he knew would return. No lieutenant in the regiment looked so closely after his men as he. Presently Toni heard the galloping of a horse and the rattling of a saber in its scabbard, and there was Paul riding up. He swung himself off his horse and came up to Toni and said:
 
[Pg 277]
 
“I came back to see what was the matter with you. I thought you would have rejoined by this time.”
 
Toni made no reply, but raised his black eyes to Paul’s blue ones and they were so full of misery that Paul involuntarily put his hand on Toni’s shoulder and asked, “What is it?”
 
Toni tried to speak, but the words would not come. Paul, putting his hand in his breast, drew out a small flask of brandy and poured the best part of it down Toni’s throat.
 
“Now,” he said, “tell me what it is.”
 
Toni’s vocabulary was not extensive and he hunted around in his mind for language to express the horror of what he was suffering, but he could only find the simplest words.
 
“Nicolas and Pierre—,” he said, “those scoundrels—have ordered me to kill you. They say if I don’t they will kill me and kill you afterward themselves.”
 
There was silence for a minute or two after this.
 
Paul knew very well that Toni was neither drunk nor crazy, and he grasped at once all that Toni meant. His face grew pale and his blond mustache twitched a little.
 
[Pg 278]
 
“So they want to put me out of the way—what for?”
 
“Because they think you are responsible for their being in trouble so much. They are desperate men, Paul.” Toni used Paul’s name unconsciously, but he was thinking then of Paul as he had known him years ago, an apple-cheeked boy who understood him and even understood Jacques.
 
Paul took his helmet off and let the cool breeze blow on his close-cropped sandy hair.
 
“Come, now,” he said, “tell me all about it—how it happened.”
 
“It is about Count Delorme,” said Toni, gasping between his sentences. “You know, Paul, I always was a coward about most things.”
 
“Yes, I know.”
 
“And when I was in the circus those two rascals used to take me with them sometimes on their robbing expeditions and make me keep watch and help to carry off the stolen things. I was frightened to death at what they made me do—too frightened to refuse to go with them. I never knew of their killing anybody, except Count Delorme, but that night they waylaid him in the dark, I swear to you—oh! God, I swear to you a million times—I never [Pg 279]touched Count Delorme. I thought they were going to rob him only—I did not dream they were going to kill him. But he resisted when they tried to get his money, and Nicolas struck him a blow and he fell over. And they put a twenty-franc piece in my pocket and swore that I had killed him and robbed him. Then I determined to get away from them and so, when I was conscripted, I could have got off because I was the only son of a widow, but I thought if I were in the army I might escape them and I meant then to hunt for you and to tell you all about it. And I thought I had escaped them—oh! how happy I was—but they turned up as you know and I have not had a moment’s peace since. Two weeks ago they forced me to go with them—”
 
“‘Forced you to go with them!’” said Paul indignantly. “Toni, you are the greatest coward.”
 
“I know it,” replied Toni. “I always was. And they told me that they meant to kill you and we played a game of cards to determine whether they should do it or I—I—think of it! Of course I lost, and they promised me if I didn’t kill you that I should be killed. And they told me to drop out of the ranks and that you would come after me, [Pg 280]and they put this knife where I could find it.” Toni drew it from his bosom. It was an ordinary table knife, but of well-tempered steel and as sharp as a razor. “And I was to kill you and leave your body here where it could not be found for several hours—and make the best of my way off. Of course, I should have been caught and guillotined, but what did they care about that?”
 
Toni turned and threw the knife as far as he could into the bosky thicket behind him. Paul Verney, who was as quiet as a lamb and as brave as a lion, looked at Toni sorrowfully.
 
“I think I can get rid of those two rapscallions in time,” he said, “get them sent to Algiers. But they will have to come back sometime.”
 
“That’s what I know,” said Toni. “We are under sentence of death, Paul, and it is all my fault.”
 
The ghost of a smile came into Paul Verney’s face.
 
“No,” he answered, “not exactly your fault, Toni. You were born that way, so you can’t help yourself.”
 
“And we are both so happy,” cried Toni, and at this he burst into a passion of tears, sobbing as [Pg 281]he had not sobbed since he was a small boy and his mother had the rheumatism and he thought she was going to die. Paul turned his back and walked up and down in front of Toni for a minute or two, and when he spoke his voice was husky.
 
“Yes,” he said, “we are both very happy, or would be except for those wretches. But, Toni, you must keep every hint of this from Denise and I shall certainly keep it from my wife.”
 
“You may be able to,” replied poor Toni, “because you are brave and self-possessed, but you know how I am. I am likely to let it out any time.”
 
“If you do,” said Paul sternly, “you may look to hear from me. Toni, have you no shame at being such a coward?”
 
“Not a bit,” replied Toni. “As you say, I was born that way. I am not afraid of horses nor of guns nor of anything that other people are afraid of.”
 
Paul inspected Toni in wrath and sorrow. He was the identical Toni that had enjoyed a ride on the runaway horse, and was cowed and terrified by the laughs and jeers of a couple of the tailor Clery’s boys, either of whom he was perfectly well able to thrash if he had wished. Paul Verney was [Pg 282]not, physically, half the man that Toni was, but not all the five Clery boys, with their father at their head, could have frightened him when he was a very small boy himself. Paul would have taken a thrashing from them one day and be ready to repeat it the next, but the mere thought of a thrashing frightened Toni out of his wits.
 
How much more, then, did the thought of being murdered scare him! Yet if Toni had been driven into the forlorn hope—“the last children” as the French picturesquely put it—he would have behaved as well as any man in it.
 
Paul Verney looked around him at the smiling, peaceful landscape basking in the afternoon light, and thought of Lucie at the château. She was probably practising her music at that hour, and then she would go for her afternoon ride with only a groom to accompany her. He would be absent from her for two whole days, and Lucie had spent a week in devising schemes for getting rid of the time. Paul was as much in love with her as she was with him, but it never occurred to him that there was any difficulty in getting rid of the time during his absence from her—he had his work to do and he meant to do it well, nor did he let the [Pg 283]thought of Lucie interfere in the least with his duty. He had cheerfully given that promise demanded of all lovers, that he would tell Lucie everything. As he had nothing to tell her of the least harm, or of the least consequence, he had laughingly made the promise. But now there was something he must conceal from her; something, the mere thought of which would blight that merry, beautiful, rose-in-bloom life that Lucie was leading; something which, if it ever came to pass, would blight it altogether.
 
Paul pulled himself together and turned his mind, as he had the power to do, resolutely away from the grisly probability presented to him.
 
“Toni,” said he, “don’t think about this thing. I believe I can get those two scoundrels out of the way, and I will; so take another pull out of this brandy flask and get on your horse and follow me.”
 
Toni did as he was told and was soon galloping at Paul Verney’s heels. The thought of Denise was before him. He knew that sometime he should tell her—he could not keep it from her—and what would Denise say, and what would she do?—be scared as he was? Presently they found themselves in the cloud of dust which enveloped the regiment [Pg 284]and Toni made his way to his place at the end of the file, Paul Verney cantering past. As Toni reined up he looked around the file and saw the red mustache and ferret-like eyes of Nicolas peering out along the line of mustached and helmeted heads. Nicolas gave him an indescribable look—a look with murder in it. Toni had had his chance, and Paul Verney had come back unharmed. That night in the bivouac Nicolas and Pierre came up to Toni and Nicolas whispered in his ear:
 
“You have two more chances—we will give you three opportunities all together.”
 
Toni said not a word in reply. He only wondered dumbly, how much of life that meant for him.
 
CHAPTER XX
 On the afternoon of the day when they returned to Beaupré Paul Verney ordered Toni to report to him at the Château Bernard for a message. Paul and Lucie were having tea together at a little table on the terrace when Toni arrived. Anything more brilliant and sparkling than Lucie’s face could not be imagined. She smiled charmingly on Toni, inquired after Denise and sent word to her to come to the château. Paul looked as cheerful and composed as ever, and said to Lucie in quite a matter-of-fact, husbandlike manner:
 
“I have some business to attend to, so I must ask you to excuse me.”
 
Lucie had found out this early in her married life, that when Paul had business to attend to she must vanish, which she did promptly. Then Paul, lighting his cigar gaily, said to Toni, standing at attention, the picture of dejection:
 
“Well, Toni, I think I have settled those two fellows. I had a talk with the colonel about them [Pg 286]to-day and he says that while we were away on the practice march some of their doings came to light, and that we would be able to send them to Algiers as disciplinaires. There is a batch going off next week, and we shall try to send our friends along with them.”
 
“How long will they be away?” asked Toni.
 
“That depends,” replied Paul. “We can only send them for a year as it is—if they keep on as they have been behaving here they may have to spend the rest of their lives in Algiers. But to get them out of the way for the present is good fortune enough. I have told the colonel the whole story about Count Delorme, and what a perfectly abject coward you are, Toni, in many ways, and he agrees with me that we had better not open the whole subject, but just get these two rascals off quietly. So if you can manage to keep from bawling like a baby for the next week and will be only half a man, the thing can be settled.”
 
“I will try,” said Toni, without making any promise of not bawling like a baby.
 
The good news, however, did enable him to keep from letting the whole thing out to Denise. She found Toni rather depressed and unhappy during [Pg 287]that week, but on the morning when the batch of hard cases was put on the train to be started for Marseilles, and Nicolas and Pierre were among them, Toni’s heart bounded with joy. He could not deny himself the pleasure of seeing his two old comrades off. They were the most sullen and angry of all the sullen and angry disciplinaires sent to atone for their misdeeds under the fierce sun of Africa. As the train moved slowly off, Nicolas thrust his red head out of the window and, shaking his fist at Toni, cried:
 
“Don’t forget—we shan’t forget.”
 
Toni, however, tried his best to forget, and succeeded beyond his expectations. He had thought himself lucky when Nicolas and Pierre were out of sight, but now, when he remembered that they were in Africa, and called to mind all the chances of fever and cholera and other things that, if they befell his two comrades in arms, would be of distinct benefit to him, he felt positively cheerful, and, as Paul Verney said, if Pierre and Nicolas kept up their career as they had done since they had joined the regiment, they would probably leave their bones in Africa.
 
So Toni, thrusting off his load of care, more [Pg 288]than he had ever done since that secret of the woods at midnight and the dead man lying stark with his face upturned to the murky sky had been laid upon him, grew merry at heart. There was a good deal to make him happy then. Denise was thoroughly devoted to him, and the sergeant, who was being very skilfully played by Madame Marcel, became perfectly reconciled to the match between Toni and Denise. After all, even if Sergeant Duval did not succeed in marrying Madame Marcel, he reflected that Toni would not be ill provided for, as Madame Marcel was extremely well off for a lady of her condition. As a means of advancing Toni’s interests, Madame Marcel was always writing to the sergeant asking him how she should invest such considerable sums as six hundred francs and once even nine hundred francs. This last sum was so very imposing that the sergeant, in giving her his advice, felt compelled to renew his offer of his hand and heart. To this Madame Marcel returned a most diplomatic reply. She said if she could see Toni married to Denise she would feel more like considering the offer. At present it was her only desire to see that happy event come off. Then, possibly, after providing liberally for Toni, she might [Pg 289]take the sergeant’s offer under reflection. The sergeant, after receiving this letter, thought himself as good as married to Madame Marcel.
 
The autumn and the winter passed as pleasantly as the summer. Paul and Lucie, after spending the summer at the Château Bernard, had come into the town and taken the small house in which they played at being poor. It was as pretty a little bower as any newly-married couple ever had. They kept only three servants and Toni still waited on Paul Verney, and there was plenty for him to do. He had no natural love for work and still reckoned it the height of bliss to lie on his stomach in the long grass and watch the gnats dancing in the sun and the foolishly industrious bees, always at work for others, get gloriously drunk on the clover blossoms. But for a private in the dragoons there was not much time for this sort of thing, and if Toni had to work he would rather work for the Verneys than for anybody else. There was a little garden behind the house in which Toni dug and planted and watered diligently under Lucie’s critical eye, and this was the least unpleasant work that he had ever done.
 
Lucie fathomed his character as well as Paul did. [Pg 290]She knew of all his strange ins and outs, his courage and cowardice, his foolish loving heart. Denise, by that time, had got the upper hand of Toni as completely as Paul Verney had got the upper hand of Lucie. Like all tender-hearted women, Lucie was a natural and incurable match-maker. Nothing pleased her better than to forward the affair between Toni and Denise. She stopped Sergeant Duval in the street to praise Toni’s virtues, expatiating upon his industry. The sergeant listened respectfully enough until Toni’s industry was mentioned, when a grim look came into his eyes.
 
“Yes, Madame,” he said, “he is the most industrious fellow alive as long as I am after him and he has the prospect of being put in the barrack prison on bread and water. Oh, there is nobody who works harder than Toni.” Lucie passed on laughing.
 
But there was a reason why Toni was so willing always to dig in the garden. There was a little sewing-room on the ground floor which had a window that opened on the garden, and at that window Denise, early in the winter, was established with her sewing. She was a beautiful seamstress, and having ten thousand francs to her fortune by [Pg 291]no means lessened her inclination to work for the good wages which Madame Verney paid her. And there was a great deal of sewing to be done just then in the little house, so while Toni dug and planted in the garden and worked among the flowers in the little greenhouse, he could glance up and see Denise’s pretty blond head bending over her fine sewing. Toni became so devoted to waiting on Lucie that he grew positively inattentive to Paul, who was compelled to swear at Toni once in a while and threaten to cuff him to bring him to his senses.
 
At New Year’s Paul’s father and mother and Captain and Madame Ravenel came to Beaupré for a visit. The little house could not accommodate more than two persons besides the master and mistress, so Monsieur and Madame Verney were entertained in great style at the Château Bernard by Madame Bernard. Toni had never been able to see Madame Ravenel without being reminded, as Paul had told him in their boyhood, of a soft and solemn strain of music in a dim cathedral, or of the river taking its way at twilight softly through the grassy meadow where the violets grew. She was still sad—she never could be anything but [Pg 292]that—but her beautiful eyes had lost their troubled look and she seemed at peace. Captain Ravenel was the same quiet, silent, soldierly man as always, who was never far from Madame Ravenel’s side. No woman was ever better loved and protected than poor Sophie. On this visit, for the first time, Toni plucked up spirit enough to speak to Madame Ravenel. She talked with him, in her gentle voice, about Bienville and his life there, and of Denise, and how she had been amused at watching them when they were little children together. Toni told Madame Ravenel how he dodged furtively around the corner of the acacia tree and climbed upon the garden wall to see her pass to and from church. Madame Ravenel went to church as much as ever, but now she went a little way within the church, though never close up to the altar, and Captain Ravenel maintained his old practice of escorting her to church and walking up and down in the street smoking his cigar until she came out, when he escorted her home again, and never let her be one waking moment without his protection.
 
Since Lucie had come into her American fortune the Ravenels no longer found it necessary to prac[Pg 293]tise that stern economy which had characterized the first years of their married life. Lucie made Sophie accept an allowance, small indeed compared with the fortune which Delorme had squandered, but it was enough to lift the Ravenels above poverty. The week that the Ravenels and the Verneys were at Beaupré was a time of quiet happiness to everybody in the modest house in which Lucie played at being poor. Madame Bernard had, of course, declared at first that she could only see Sophie and Ravenel surreptitiously, as it were, but ended, as she invariably did, by driving up in her great coach and absolutely taking Sophie to drive in the face of all Beaupré. This was Lucie’s doing, unaided by either of the persons concerned, by Paul, or by Captain Ravenel, but Lucie was accustomed to triumphs of this sort and knew perfectly well how to achieve them.
 
One morning, a year after Paul’s marriage, when Toni went to him at seven o’clock in the morning, he found Paul already up and dressed and walking in the garden, and he shouted, as Toni came in:
 
“It’s a boy, Toni.”
 
And that very day Toni was taken up stairs into a darkened room where, in a lace and silk [Pg 294]covered bassinet lay the little Paul, who seemed to Toni at once grotesque and sacred, as indeed it seemed to Paul himself. The baby waxed and thrived, and, after a while, when Lucie and Paul again had their breakfast in the garden, as they had done in their early married life, the baby was brought out and lay in his nurse’s arms blinking solemnly at the great wide world before him. Paul Verney was a devoted father, and as he had talked intimately with Toni all his life, so he talked with him about this child so longed for and so loved.
 
“It seems to me, Toni,” said Paul, one morning after breakfast in the garden, when Lucie and the baby had gone within for their noonday rest, and Paul was looking over some papers which Toni had brought him, “it seems to me, Toni, as if I am too happy. It makes me afraid.”
 
A look of fear came into Toni’s eyes.
 
“I feel the same way,” he whispered, “everything seems to be too easy—too bright. Now, if the sergeant had kept on opposing me or if Mademoiselle Duval were against me—but I do assure you, Paul, they are both as sweet as milk. I don’t know how long it will last, but if it lasts until I marry Denise that will be long enough. My [Pg 295]mother has just sold a little piece of ground she had, on the outskirts of Bienville, and has got a thumping price for it. I think the sergeant is more in love with her than ever, since she sold the ground for such a price.”
 
“Well, Toni,” answered Paul gaily, “we don’t deserve our happiness—that much is certain. I am no more fit for Lucie than you are fit for Denise—she’s a thousand times too good for you and always will be—but we can enjoy our happiness just the same.”
 
Another year passed, and Toni had come to believe that this earth was Heaven and would have been most unwilling to leave it for the brightest prospects above. Denise was then very busy sewing at her wedding trousseau, and Toni would be Paul’s servant only a little while longer. A corporal was Toni to become—an honor that Toni had no more dreamed of than of succeeding President Loubet. This honor was equally astonishing to Sergeant Duval. But all the same Toni was to be promoted and was not to ride in the ranks any longer. This distinction he had not coveted, as it implied a great deal more work even than he had to do as a private soldier.
 
[Pg 296]
 
But one must accept honors even when thrust upon one. It made the prospect of the riding-school seem less attractive to Toni. He not only began to feel that the separation from Paul would be harder than ever, but from Lucie also, and the little baby Paul. In some unaccountable way this little morsel of humanity had stolen his way into Toni’s heart, so much so, that when the baby preferred to play with Jacques in preference to all the expensive toys which were lavished on him, Toni actually tied Jacques around the baby’s neck and made a solemn gift of it to him. It seemed almost incredible to Toni that he could give Jacques away, but it was to him very like the bestowal of a splendid heirloom on a child who is to carry on the traditions of a great family.
 
As for the sergeant, ever since Madame Marcel had sold her piece of ground, he had treated Toni as a son. When Toni was made a corporal, he could command his own time much more than when he had been a private soldier, but Denise, like most brides, was so taken up with the important matter of the trousseau that she had very little time to bestow on Toni. Toni, never having questioned her authority in his life, quietly submitted to this.
 
At last the great day drew near—it was only a week off—the day of Toni’s marriage. Toni expected to be frightened to death, but Paul warned him that if he showed the white feather he should have the long-promised cuffing as soon as he returned from his wedding tour. The sergeant also suspected Toni’s courage and kept a stern eye on him in the last day or so before the wedding, but Toni maintained his courage and declared the only thing he dreaded was the march up the aisle of the church and back again, in which apprehension he did not stand alone among bridegrooms. Although it was only the wedding of a corporal and the sergeant’s daughter, it was to be quite a grand affair, chiefly through the exertions of Lucie, who dearly loved to make a gala out of everything and particularly out of Toni’s and Denise’s marriage. She had bestowed presents on them with a lavish hand and Paul, out of his small pay and allowance, had given Toni a handsome gold watch.
 
The great question of the honeymoon and where it was to be spent came up. Being a corporal, Toni could get a short leave—how much he did not know.
 
The next day Toni laid his case before Paul [Pg 298]when he and Lucie were at breakfast in the garden. The boy could now toddle about, his dark, bright eyes like his mother’s. He was fonder than ever of Toni and liked to be carried on his strong arm. Toni was holding the baby thus and he was clutching Jacques devotedly in his little hand. Lucie suggested a whole week, but Paul shook his head at the mention of a week’s leave for a corporal.
 
“It would be very unusual,” he said.
 
Lucie said nothing at all, but when Paul had gone off, went up, and, taking the baby out of Toni’s arms and laying her soft cheek against little Paul’s rose-leaf face, said to Toni:
 
“I think I can manage it.”
 
And she did, in a manner precisely like Lucie. She dressed herself in her prettiest gown and hat, took her white lace parasol and, getting into a carriage, went in search of the colonel of the regiment. When she found him she poured out the story of Toni and Denise and all about Bienville, including her childish love affair with Paul. And then she went on and recounted with such inimitable drollery her efforts to wring an offer out of Paul, his horror at her American ways of doing things, and the perplexity which a Frenchman always experiences in [Pg 299]his love-affairs with an American, that the colonel burst out laughing and agreed to do anything Lucie should ask, and what she asked was one whole week of leave for Toni’s honeymoon. The colonel also promised to protect Lucie from Paul’s wrath when he should hear how Toni’s leave had been obtained. This was needed, for Paul scowled and growled that women should not meddle with such things, to which Lucie promptly agreed, except when it should be some affair in which, like this, a woman was deeply interested.
 
Mademoiselle Duval hankered very much to go on the honeymoon with Toni and Denise, but having heard that Paris was a very sinful place she doubted the wisdom of trusting herself there even for a visit. Toni contrived to make her understand that Paris was a great deal more sinful even than she suspected it to be, that there were few churches and the means of salvation were limited, and finally convinced Mademoiselle Duval that she would risk her soul’s salvation by venturing in that wicked town.
 
CHAPTER XXI
 Toni and Denise had selected for their wedding day the anniversary of the marriage of Paul and Lucie two years before. The wedding was as fine as Lucie could make it, and she had great capabilities in that line. The garrison chapel was decked with flowers, the organ played, and it was much more like the wedding of a lieutenant than a corporal—Lucie paying for it all. Madame Marcel came from Bienville to the wedding and was resplendent in a purple silk gown, a lace collar and a bonnet with an aigrette in it. She looked so young and handsome that, together with the sale of her piece of land, she wholly dazzled the sergeant, who speculated on his chances of leading her to the altar sometime within a year.
 
Mademoiselle Duval treated herself to a new black gown and a very forbidding-looking black bonnet, but really presented an elegant though austere appearance. Denise’s white wedding gown was made with her own fingers, and, although it was only a [Pg 301]simple muslin, never was there a daintier looking bride in the world than the sergeant’s daughter.
 
In the first row of seats in the church sat Paul and Lucie, the latter charmingly dressed in honor of the occasion. The chapel was filled with humbler people, friends of the bride and bridegroom. The bride, with her father, the sergeant, arrived in great state in Lucie’s victoria and pair and the same equipage—the handsomest in Beaupré—carried the newly-married pair back to the large room in one of the plain but comfortable hotels of the place, where a wedding breakfast was served.
 
Toni was not at all frightened at the imminent circumstances of the day. On the contrary, he felt a sense of protection in marrying Denise. She would always be at hand to take care of him, for Toni felt the need of being taken care of just as much, in spite of his five feet ten, and his one hundred and fifty pounds weight, and his being the crack rider in the regiment, as he had done in the old days at Bienville when he ran away from the little Clery boys. He did not, therefore, experience the usual panic which often attacks the stoutest-hearted bridegroom, and went through the wedding breakfast with actual courage. He absolutely for[Pg 302]got everything painful in his past life. Nicolas and Pierre melted away—he did not feel as if they had ever existed. The secret which had haunted him was a mere fantasy, that vanished in the glow of his wedding morning.
 
Paul and Lucie came in during the breakfast and Paul proposed the bridegroom’s health with his hand on Toni’s shoulder, Toni grinning in ecstasy meanwhile. Paul spoke of their early intimacy, and Toni made a very appropriate reply—at least Denise and Madame Marcel thought so. After the lieutenant and his wife had left, the fun grew fast and furious. It was as merry a wedding breakfast as Paul’s and Lucie’s, even though the guests were such simple people as would come to the corporal’s wedding with the sergeant’s daughter. Toni could have said with truth that it was the happiest day of his life.
 
When the wedding party dispersed, and they returned to the Duvals’ lodgings that the bride might change her dress, the sergeant, being left alone in the little sitting-room with Madame Marcel, grew positively tender, saying to her in the manner which he had found perfectly killing with the girls twenty-five years before:
 
[Pg 303]
 
“Now, Madame, that we have seen our children happily married we should think somewhat of our own future. The same joy which those two children have may be ours.”
 
Madame Marcel, who had heretofore received all the sergeant’s gallant speeches with an air of blushing consciousness, suddenly burst out laughing in a very self-possessed manner, and said:
 
“Oh, we are much too old, Monsieur; we should be quite ridiculous if either one of us thought of marrying.”
 
The sergeant received a shock at this, particularly as he considered himself still young and handsome.
 
“My dear Madame Marcel,” he replied impressively, “certainly age has not touched you and I flatter myself”—here he drew himself up and twirled the ends of his superbly-waxed mustaches—“that so far time has not laid his hand heavily on me.”
 
“If you wish to marry, Monsieur,” replied Madame Marcel, still laughing, “you ought to marry some young girl. Men of your age always like girls young enough to be their daughters,” and she laughed again quite impertinently.
 
[Pg 304]
 
The sergeant frowned at Madame Marcel. He had never seen this phase of her character before.
 
“I assure you, Madame,” he said stiffly, “that if I care to aspire to the hand of a young woman of my daughter’s age, I might not be really considered too old; but I prefer a maturer person like yourself.”
 
Madame Marcel, seeing that the sergeant was becoming deeply chagrined, determined not to dash his hopes too suddenly, so she reassumed her old manner of girlish embarrassment and said:
 
“Well, Monsieur, one wedding makes many, you know; but a wedding is a fatiguing business to go through with, particularly at our age. It will take us both, at our time of life, several weeks to recover from this delightful event and we may then discuss the project you mention.”
 
This was slightly encouraging, and as the sergeant had nothing better to comfort himself with he contrived to extract some satisfaction from it.
 
When Denise appeared, dressed in her neat gray traveling gown, the Verneys’ handsome victoria was at the door to take her and Toni to the station. Toni and Denise felt very grand, as well as very happy, sitting up in the fine victoria with the pair [Pg 305]of prancing bays, and although they were conscious that the footman and coachman were thrusting their tongues into their cheeks, it mattered very little to Denise and Toni, whose black eyes were lustrous with delight. At last, he reflected joyously, he had some one who would be obliged to look after him the rest of his life.
 
When they reached the station the train was almost ready to depart. Toni had wished, on this auspicious day, to travel to Paris second-class, but the prudent Denise concluded that as they would go through life third-class they had better begin on that basis. So Toni selected a third-class carriage which was vacant and, tipping half a franc to the guard, he and Denise found themselves in it without other company. It was their first moment alone since they had been made one. Toni put his arm around Denise and drew her head on his shoulder with the strangest feeling in his heart of being protected, and Denise, for her part, had the sense of having adopted this fine, handsome, laughing fellow, to shield under her wing the rest of her life. Yet they were lovers deep and sincere. No French gentleman had ever treated his fiancée with greater respect than Toni, the corporal, had treated [Pg 306]Denise, or ever had a higher rapture in their first long kiss.
 
He was roused from his dream in Paradise by the consciousness of a sinister presence near him, and his eyes fell on the red head of Nicolas peering like the serpent in the Garden of Eden in at the window of the railway carriage. If the place of eternal torment had yawned before Toni’s eyes he could not have felt a greater horror. And this was increased when Nicolas coolly opened the door of the carriage and got in, followed by Pierre, and the two seated themselves directly opposite the newly-married pair. Almost immediately the train moved off. Toni had only one thought in his mind—to keep Denise from finding out that terrible secret of his—why he hated and feared these men. He hated and feared them now more than ever, but some new courage seemed to be born in him. The cardinal difference between a brave man and a coward is that a brave man can think when he is afraid and can even act sensibly, and a coward can not do either. Always before this when he had been frightened, Toni had acted like a fool, but now he acted as sensibly as Paul Verney himself could, and for once behaved bravely, although he was contend[Pg 307]ing with men instead of horses. The two rogues opposite him leered at Denise, nudged each other, and Pierre held out his hand to Toni.
 
“How do you do, comrade?” he said.
 
For answer, Toni folded his arms and looked at the extended paw with disgust.
 
“No, I thank you,” he replied, in a voice as steady as if he were managing a vicious brute of a horse. “Denise, don’t look at them, my dear,” and he motioned her to sit with him in the furthest corner of the carriage.
 
Denise surmised who these two individuals were, but said nothing, only averting her eyes from them. Nicolas then persisted in trying to converse.
 
“We are back from Algiers,” he remarked impressively.
 
“It doesn’t require a genius to know that,” Toni answered tartly. “It’s a great pity you were not kept there for ever.”
 
He felt astonished at his own boldness in saying this, and the devil of fear, taking on a new guise, made him afraid of his own boldness. But, at all events, he felt that there was no danger of his betraying himself then before Denise. Nicolas and Pierre continued to wink and make remarks, evi[Pg 308]dently directed at Denise. Toni stood it quietly, but the first time the guard passed he spoke to him.
 
“These two fellows,” he said, “are impertinent to my wife. At the first station I would thank you to put them in another carriage.”
 
The guard had seen the fine style in which Toni had driven to the station with his bride, and also respected Toni’s smart corporal’s uniform, so he bowed politely and said, “Certainly,” and the next station being reached in two minutes, Toni had the satisfaction of seeing his two friends unceremoniously hauled out and thrust into another carriage which was before nearly full. As they went out Pierre laughed—a laugh terrible in Toni’s ears.
 
“You haven’t been very polite to us,” he said, “but we shall meet again. Remember I promised you that when we parted two years ago, and we never go back on what we say.”
 
This troubled Denise and when they were alone Toni told her as much as he thought well for her to know of Nicolas and Pierre, but it was not enough to disturb her very much on her wedding journey. Toni, however, again felt that old fear clutching and tearing him. His courage had been merely outward, and outward it continued. He was [Pg 309]apparently the most smiling and cheerful bridegroom in the whole city of Paris, but no man ever carried on his heart a heavier load of anxiety and oppression.
 
Madame Marcel had given Toni a little sum of money which was quite beyond his corporal’s pay for his wedding tour, and they had taken a little lodging in the humbler quarters of Paris, and here they were to spend the precious week of their honeymoon. It was still bright daylight at seven on a June evening when they reached their lodgings and removed the stains of travel. Toni, in the gayest manner possible, proposed that they should take a stroll on the river bank before going to their supper. It was a heavenly evening and a gorgeous sunset was mirrored in the dancing river as Toni and Denise leaned over the parapet of the bridge of the Invalides, holding each other’s hands as they had done when they were little children sitting on the bench under the acacia tree at Bienville. Toni could have groaned aloud in his agony. He would be the happiest creature on earth if only those two wretches had not appeared. He was happy in spite of them, but then the terrible thought came to him that they had promised to [Pg 310]kill him and Paul Verney, too, and they were of a class of men who usually keep their word when they promise villainy. He felt an acute pang of sorrow for Denise and an acute pang for himself and for Paul and Lucie—so young they all were, so happy, and that happiness threatened by a couple of wretches who would think no more of taking a man’s life than of killing a rat, if they had the opportunity.
 
He looked at the crowds of gaily-dressed people which filled the streets with life. He looked at Denise in the charming freshness of her youth, her tender eyes repeating with every glance that she loved Toni better than anybody else in the world. He considered all the splendor and beauty around him—the dancing river and the great arched, dark blue sky above them in which the palpitating stars were shining faintly and a silver moon trembled—and he could scarcely keep from groaning aloud at the thought of being torn from all he loved. But he gave no outward sign of it. Denise thought him as happy as she was.
 
After their supper at a gay café they came across one of those open-air balls which are a feature of Paris, and they danced together merrily for [Pg 311]an hour. Everybody saw they were sweethearts and some jokes were made at their expense, which Toni did not mind in the least and would have enjoyed hugely, but—but— Afterward they walked home under the quiet night sky. In place of their gaiety and laughter a deep and solemn happiness possessed Toni as well as Denise, except for this terrible fear, black and threatening, which would not be thrust out of his happiest hours.
 
Paris in June for a pair of lovers on a honeymoon trip, with enough money to meet their modest wants, is an earthly Paradise. Denise loved to exhibit her muslin gowns, made with her own hands, by the side of her handsome corporal, in the cheap cafés and theaters which they patronized. They found acquaintances, as everybody does in Paris. The lodging-house keeper became their friend and invited them to her daughter’s birthday fête. They went out to Versailles on Sunday and saw the fountains plashing, studied the windows of the magnificent shops in the grand avenues, and were perfectly happy, except for the black care that sat upon Toni’s heart. Life could be so delightful, thought Toni, but his would end so soon. Toni almost felt the knife that Nicolas would stick into [Pg 312]him. He pondered over the various ways in which he might be killed—a blow like that which felled Count Delorme might do for him. He imagined himself found dead in the streets of Beaupré some dark night, and the story of how he came by his death would never be known. And he thought of Paul—that his body might be found in a thicket of the park of the Château Bernard, just as Count Delorme’s had been. Toni was an imaginative person and the horror of his situation was enhanced by the Paradise of the present. He wondered sometimes how he managed to keep it all from Denise, but he did for once.
 
Too soon the time came when he had to return to Beaupré. It was on a wet and gloomy day that he and Denise alighted from a third-class carriage at the little station. They walked straight to their modest lodgings, and then Toni went to seek Paul. His leave was not up by several hours, so he need not report at once. He found Paul at the headquarters building in a little room where he worked alone. When Toni came in and shut the door carefully behind him, Paul whirled around in his chair expecting to see a radiant, rapturous Toni. Instead of that, Toni dropped the mask which he had [Pg 313]worn before Denise and looked at Paul with a pair of eyes so distressed, so haunted, so anxious, that Paul knew in a moment something had happened.
 
“Well, Toni,” he began, and then asked, “What is the matter?”
 
Toni, instead of standing at attention, leaned heavily against the desk—his legs could hardly support him.
 
“The day I was married,” he said, “when Denise and I got in the railway carriage to go to Paris, Nicolas and Pierre got in, too.”
 
Paul’s ruddy, frank and smiling face grew pale as Toni said these words. They might mean for him, as well as for Toni, a decree of doom, and, like Toni, he was so happy that the thought he should be torn away from it all seemed the more cruel.
 
“And what did they say and do?” he inquired after a painful pause.
 
“They were very insulting at first to Denise, but I told her not to notice them, and they wanted to shake hands with me, but I refused.”
 
“Did you?” cried Paul, in amazement. “Is it possible that you didn’t act like a poltroon and shake hands with them and do whatever they asked you to do?”
 
[Pg 314]
 
This was no sarcasm on Paul’s part, but a plain expression of what he expected Toni would do, and Toni was not at all offended at this imputation on his courage and good sense.
 
“Yes,” he said, “I acted the man with them. I never did it before, but I did more than that—I called the guard, who made them go into another carriage.”
 
Paul gazed at Toni with wide-eyed surprise. Here was the most astonishing thing that ever happened—Toni actually showing a little courage with these men.
 
“I can hardly believe it is you, Toni, standing before me. If you had shown the same spirit all the time, you would not now live in dread about that Delorme affair.”
 
“Perhaps not,” sighed poor Toni, “but you know how I always was, Paul.”
 
“I think you are going to be something different now,” replied Paul cheerfully. It was not pleasant—the thought that these two rascals, who had promised to kill him as well as Toni, were alive and in Paris, but Paul’s nerves were perfect and he easily recovered his balance.
 
“But the thought of it—the thought of it!” [Pg 315]cried Toni, opening his arms and standing up straight. “The knife entering my breast or that blow on the side of the head such as they gave Count Delorme. I feel them and see them everywhere I look. If I see a man walking on the street he seems to take the shape of Nicolas or Pierre. Every time I turn a corner I expect to see them. And there is Denise—and then I think of you being found some night or some day, dead—will it be in the morning or in the evening—will it be in the summer time or in the autumn?—and Madame and the little one—” Falling into a chair, Toni broke down and cried and sobbed bitterly. Paul put his arm around Toni’s neck. Their two heads were close together just as they had been in the old days on the bridge at Bienville. He said no word to Toni, but the touch of his arm was strength and comfort, and presently Toni stopped crying and grew calm again.
 
“Never mind, Toni,” said Paul, “I think we can take care of ourselves. We must go armed. It would not do any good if you were to inform on those two rascals. Of course they would deny it—you can’t punish a man for crime he hasn’t committed. We shall have to take our chances—that is all. [Pg 316]But if one of us is killed, the other one will be safe, because then your story will be believed.”
 
That was not much comfort to Toni, who replied:
 
“If you are killed, what will life be to me? and if I am killed think of Denise, and you.”
 
They sat a little while longer talking, Paul encouraging Toni and at last raising in him some of the spirit which had made him have Nicolas and Pierre turned out of the railway carriage. Paul said that they were comparatively safe at Beaupré where Nicolas and Pierre would not dare to come, but Toni did not take this view. He thought that men who had committed one murder and had contemplated another for two years would not hesitate to come to Beaupré in order to fulfil their purpose. The effort to keep his agony from being suspected by Denise was, however, perfectly successful. Denise suspected nothing, nor did the sergeant nor anybody, except Paul Verney.
CHAPTER XXII
 Baby Paul’s birthday was celebrated a few days after Toni and Denise returned, and there was a little fête, to which they were invited. It was given on the terrace of the Château Bernard where Paul and Lucie’s wedding breakfast had been served. The baby, a beautiful child toddling about, clung to Jacques, which hung around his neck by a little gold chain, with as much tenacity as Toni had clasped that gallant soldier for so many years of his boyhood. Also the little boy clung to Toni and, refusing to go to his nurse, insisted on being carried in Toni’s arms the whole afternoon. This pleased Toni immensely and amused everybody present. Lucie looked charming as ever, and thanked Toni for playing nurse-maid. The child’s beauty, and the delight of the young father and mother in him, almost broke Toni’s heart. In a little while the boy might be fatherless, and that gay and graceful Lucie might be widowed. He was still haunted by that vision of the face of Nicolas, whom he reckoned, if there be such a thing as a gradation in villainy, to be a worse villain than Pierre; that is to say, a more dangerous one. He glanced around him fearfully, expecting to see one or the other of them. At last, while walking about the grounds below the terrace, still carrying the little Paul in his short fluffy white dress, there was something like a horrible passing vision of Nicolas’ red head behind the hedge that divided the gardens from the park.
 
At that moment Lucie, followed by the nurse, appeared, tripping through the grass. Her pretty black head was bare and she held up her dainty chiffon skirts, showing beautiful black satin shoes with shining buckles on them.
 
“I came to look for you, Toni,” she cried, “you must enjoy yourself this afternoon and not be troubled with little Paul all the time. He must be made to go to his nurse and behave himself.”
 
“It is no trouble, Madame,” said Toni from the very bottom of his heart; “I love to have the little fellow in my arms and he is so quiet and good when he is with me.”
 
“Come, dearest,” said Lucie to the baby, “nurse will take you”—at which little Paul was neither good nor quiet, but kicked and screamed and would have nothing to say to the nurse, much to the indignation of the latter, who accused Toni of spoiling the child outrageously.
 
Glancing around at that moment, Toni distinctly saw Nicolas’ head behind the hedge. Not only he saw it, but Lucie as well. She walked toward the opening through which the path ran, and, as she saw Nicolas, very dusty and travel-stained, her generous heart went out in pity to him. She was always taking in stray cats and dogs, and stray human beings as well, and giving them a dinner and a franc, and on this day above all others no one near her should want for anything. She went up to Nicolas and asked pleasantly:
 
“Whom are you looking for, my man?”
 
Nicolas, in no wise taken aback, replied politely:
 
“For an old comrade of mine—Toni by name.”
 
He did not recognize Lucie, but seeing something in her manner of address which indicated that he might get money out of her, he whined:
 
“I have been serving my time in Africa and got back to France very poor, and I have hardly had a good meal since I came.”
 
“You shall not say that,” cried Lucie. “No person, and certainly no one who has been a soldier, shall want for a meal where we are. Come.” She turned and walked toward the château, the nurse, meanwhile, wrestling vigorously with the baby, whom Toni secretly encouraged in his rebellion.
 
Nicolas followed Lucie and was delighted at his own diplomacy. He reckoned her good for a couple of francs at least. She showed him a side entrance where, in a small and shady courtyard, the servants were drinking little Paul’s health and cutting a birthday cake expressly designed for them. Nicolas went in and not only ate and drank in honor of the little child whose father he meant to murder, but was provided with a good meal by Lucie’s orders. After he had eaten and drunk, he desired to slink away, not thinking it worth while to risk meeting Paul even in the pursuit of the couple of francs which he felt sure he could get out of Lucie. As he slouched rapidly across the lawn, he looked up and saw, on the terrace, Paul and Lucie standing together. All the guests had left and Madame Bernard had gone indoors, but Toni, meaning to give Paul a word of warning, remained a little while with Denise waiting for his chance to speak. But his warning was not necessary. As Lucie saw Nicolas’ shabby figure slinking across the lawn, she said to Paul:
 
“There is a man that I found outside the hedge and he has been a soldier, so I made him come in and he drank the baby’s health with the servants, and I made them give him a good meal besides.”
 
A glance of recognition, which neither Lucie nor Denise saw, passed between Paul and Toni. Paul only remarked to her:
 
“You should be a little careful, Lucie, in introducing strange men among the servants, even though they claim to be soldiers. However, no harm is done this time.”
 
“But he said he was hungry, Paul, and I can not bear that any one at the Château Bernard or at our house should want, for anything on this delightful day—the baby’s first birthday.”
 
As Lucie spoke, her eyes sparkled and she laid her hand on Paul’s shoulder. Their honeymoon had, as yet, no break.
 
Toni then turned to go with Denise.
 
He maintained his outward calm, though inwardly he was storm-tossed. He knew that Paul Verney suffered none of these qualms of terror, but was perfectly cool, calm and self-possessed.
 
 
“Oh, what a thing is courage,” thought Toni, “to be a brave man all around.”
 
But he was learning to master his fear a little, or at least to control the outward expression of it. He and Denise walked briskly through the park. Denise, it being still their honeymoon, would have liked to loiter a little in the twilight shadows, but Toni making the excuse that he would soon be due at the barracks, they lost no time. He took Denise’s hand in his. She thought it was a lover’s clasp, but in truth he felt that old clinging to Denise for protection as well as affection. He wished that he could have put his hand in his pocket and felt Jacques, but Jacques was now the treasured possession of the little Paul. Toni was glad when he got out of the park and into the lighted streets.
 
He had to go to the barracks and Denise was to return to their lodgings. They parted under a dark archway and had the opportunity to exchange a farewell kiss. Toni wondered if it would be the last kiss he would ever give Denise. For the first time, Denise, looking into Toni’s troubled eyes, began to suspect something was wrong with him, but she said no word and went quietly home.
 
 
It was then nearly eight o’clock and Toni was kept busy at the barracks for an hour more. He was off duty that night and was allowed to spend it at home, and at ten o’clock he left the big barrack yard to go to his lodgings. The afternoon and early evening had been brilliantly lovely, but now a cold rain was fitfully falling and the night sky was dark with storm-clouds which raced across the face of the moon. The streets of the little town grew deserted, and Toni, as he walked rapidly along, saw Nicolas and Pierre, in imagination, behind every wall and tree and corner. There was a short way to his lodgings, which led through the narrow and dark streets, but the long way led by the railway station where there were always people moving about and a plenty of light, and Toni concluded to take the long way home. He ran nearly all the way, longing to get to the circle of light made by the railway station. There was one place where he had to cross a bridge which spanned the iron tracks, and it was quite dark. Toni felt his heart thumping and jumping as he neared this place. Once across it, he would feel comparatively safe, and would walk along quietly in the glare of the electric lamps.
 
 
As he got to this place he heard a smothered cry, and, frightened as he was, he stopped and peered over the rail of the bridge. Near the track two figures were wrestling desperately. In the half-darkness, Toni could see that each one was trying to throw the other on the railway track. Far-off sounded the roar and reverberation, the thunder and shaking of the earth, of the fast-approaching express train. Toni was thrilled with horror and frozen to the ground. He could not have moved to have saved his life. In fact, there was no way for him to reach the two men struggling to destroy each other, except by leaping over the bridge twenty feet below. The huge headlight of the onrushing train cast a ghastly glare over the black earth, intersected by lines of steel, and revealed to Toni that the two figures in mortal struggle were Nicolas and Pierre. Nicolas was the stronger of the two, and he was trying to throw Pierre under the wheels of the advancing locomotive, but Pierre hung on with unnatural strength. He could not drag himself away from the track, but he clung fiercely and desperately to Nicolas. In an instant more the train thundered upon the two men and wild shrieks cut the air above the roar. The locomo[Pg 325]tive gave a sudden jar, and then plunged ahead and came to a stop. Toni, holding on with both hands to the parapet of the bridge, could have cried aloud in fear and horror of what was passing before him. A dozen figures of men with flashing lanterns appeared at once, and by the side of the track they picked up Pierre and Nicolas where they had been pitched. Both of them were quite dead.
 
All of Toni’s faculties had seemed numbed while he had watched this tragedy of less than five minutes’ duration, but in the space of a second the instinct of flight developed in him, and he turned around and ran, retracing his path, as if a thousand devils were after him. His heart was thumping still more wildly than when he had followed the same road a little while before, but now it was for joy. Toni was a primitive creature and was not troubled by any scruples in rejoicing at the death of his fellow man, when that fellow man had worried and troubled him as Pierre and Nicolas had done. He kept on thanking God in his heart, and even whispering his thanks as he ran.
 
He took the short way back to his lodgings. In the same street, only a few doors off, was a small church. The lights in most of the houses were out. [Pg 326]All was quiet—the church and houses, as well as the people, seemed asleep. Toni’s pious instincts rose up and possessed him. He must go into that church and thank God for himself, for Denise, for Paul and for Lucie. He crept up the steps and quietly tried the door, but it was locked. Toni had a jack-knife in his pocket, and the lock on the church door not being worth much, he deliberately pried it open, and stepped softly into the church. It was dark and damp, and the flagstones were very cold, but far-off before the little altar the sanctuary lamp glowed brightly. A sudden remembrance overcame Toni of Madame Ravenel not daring to go far in the church, and he honestly reckoned himself a much worse person than Madame Ravenel, so he fell down on the cold stones of the aisle, just within the door, not on his knees, but on his face, and thanked God and all the saints that Pierre and Nicolas were dead. He recalled with an agony of remorse that when he was a boy he used to run away on Sundays instead of going to church, and felt himself the chief of sinners because he had not listened with the strictest attention and the deepest satisfaction to long-winded sermons. He began to sob and pray aloud in his ecstasy of gratitude, and promised more things to the Most High than the greatest saint that ever lived could have performed. He repeated every prayer he knew, but as his repertory was not extensive, he had to say them over again many times. The stones were hard and cold as most stones are, but Toni thought them a bed of roses. He did not know how long he had lain there, but presently sheer fatigue brought him to his senses. It occurred to him that Denise might be anxious about him, but he was in that exaltation of piety which made him rather exult in being uncomfortable himself and making Denise uncomfortable, too—a not uncommon condition in natures like Toni’s. He had been there more than an hour when he heard a light step behind him and turned. There was Denise with her hat and jacket on. She tiptoed up to him and whispered in his ear:
 
“I went out in the street to look for you, Toni, and I saw the church door open and you lying here. What are you doing?”
 
“Thanking God!” responded Toni out loud. “Down on your knees, Denise.”
 
Denise, very much astounded at this newly-developed piety of Toni’s, did as she was bid, having been piously brought up. At the end of a few min[Pg 328]utes she rose, but Toni was obstinate. He wanted to stay in the church all night on his knees. Denise, determined to find out what ailed him, spoke to him with that tone of gentle authority which he had never resisted since they were little children together, walking hand in hand at Bienville. She dragged Toni out of the church, stumbling along in the darkness, and he shut the door carefully. They were only a step or two from their lodgings, and climbing up to their two little rooms, Toni took Denise in his arms and poured out the whole story of Nicolas and Pierre, sobbing between times, and laughing, like one possessed. Denise wept—she saw nothing to laugh at—and actually expressed some pity for the two lost souls of Nicolas and Pierre. This seemed really impious to Toni.
 
The recital did not take long, and then Toni, taking his cap, said:
 
“I must run now, as fast as I can, to the Château Bernard. Monsieur Paul must know this.”
 
Denise did not detain him and he ran softly down stairs and took his way through the dark streets and along the deserted highway until he reached the park of the Château Bernard. He climbed the wall and walked swiftly through the park until he got to the château, standing white and stately upon its broad terraces. It was then quite one o’clock in the morning. The sky had cleared and a great hobgoblin moon was looking down on the church steeples of the town, visible afar off. Toni knew the window of Paul’s room. It was on the first floor above the ground floor, and at a corner. He knew the only way to awaken Paul, without alarming the house, was to throw pebbles at his window, but there were no pebbles to be found. He remembered, however, that Paul was a light sleeper, and going under the window Toni called out softly a dozen times—“Paul—Paul—Monsieur.” Presently the window of the room came open, and he heard Paul’s voice asking softly:
 
“Who is that?”
 
“It is I,” whispered Toni, creeping under the window. “Come down.”
 
In a few moments a small door under the window opened noiselessly, and Paul came out in his trousers and shirt. Toni caught him around the neck and whispered in his ear:
 
“They are dead, Paul, both of them. They were fighting on the railway track when the Paris train came along. I saw them both quite dead.”
 
 
Paul knew at once whom Toni meant. A great wave of gratitude welled up in his heart. He did not, like Toni, drop on his face and weep and fall into a paroxysm of piety, but he felt his release from the sentence of death pronounced against them both, as much as Toni did.
 
“Then we are saved, Toni, from that knife-thrust in the heart or that blow on the side of the head,” said Paul quietly. “Thank God!”
 
“I have told Denise,” whispered Toni, “now you go, Paul, and tell Madame.”
 
Just then a light shone in Lucie’s window. She passed into Paul’s room, and going to the open window, her white figure leaned out.
 
“I am coming in now, dearest,” called Paul softly, stepping under the window. “I have good news.”
 
In a little while Toni was plodding back through the park. He meant to be a model husband, the best father that ever lived, if God should give him children, the most worthy, blameless corporal in the French army. He meant to give all his substance to the poor, including Denise’s dowry, to go to church twice a day on week-days and three times on Sundays, and to lead a life which would be a perfect combination of the contemplative and the actively charitable. All of the time that he could spare from his military duties, he meant to give to prayer, and to make Denise pray with him. He intended to fast and to make Denise fast, too. Not St. Elizabeth, queen of Hungary, married to St. Louis, king of France, could have led the life which Toni, in these first moments, promised that he and Denise should lead. Never was there on earth so good a man as Toni meant to be thereafter.